Easy Atmosphere Effects Tutorial
Man has always been fascinated with space and everything in it. Planets, stars, black holes, solar systems…these objects have been the subject of many forms of art. With Photoshop, designing space art has never been easier. Today’s tutorial is actually quite simple.
I’m going to show you how to create an atmosphere that one might see around a planet. Keep in mind that this technique can be used to create a really nice glow effect for a lot of different projects as well.
To start off, create a new photoshop document. Make it 1000 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high.
Set your foreground color to black and with the paint bucket tool, fill the current layer with black. Create a new layer, and call it Planet.
Select the Ellipse Marquee tool and holding down the shift key, drag a fairly good sized circle. Fill it with black. You won’t see the circle because we’ve got a black circle on a black background. If you look at the layers window, you can see that there is indeed a black circle.
Now click on the Layer Styles button. Use the values in the screen shots below to add an Outer Glow and an Inner Glow.
Right click over the FX icon in the Planet layer and click on Create Layers. This takes the effects that we added and makes them into separate layers so we can more easily manipulate our atmosphere effects.
Add a Layer Mask to each of the effect layers, and remembering the rule “white allows, black suppresses” mask out a portion of the glows as shown.
Congratulations, you have successfully created a dark planet with atmosphere. There are other things you can do such as adding texture to the planet or creating a star field that can be placed behind your planet to give it a more natural setting. In the one below, I toned down the outer glow a bit and created a textured planet that looks more natural.
For more tutorials and other design tidbits, check back often!
March 27, 2009 at 9:37 am | Design, Tutorials |
Bloody marvelous! I have always loved your spacescapes and have often wondered how you managed to get that marvelous glow around the planets. Wonderful tut!
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I love your website dad. I especially love the b-bits. And are you still working on it. I really like the spacescapes, they are cool. In fact I love the whole thing.
Love You.