Posted on January 14, 2012 by
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Photoshop Space Tutorial

Space has always fascinated me. We’ll never know everything that’s out there, but we sure can imagine! In this Photoshop space tutorial, you’ll learn how to create planets using textures, stars, and glowing elements! Video and written tutorial included.

This tutorial will go over the creation of many elements which you might find in space. Stars, planets, unknown shiny things. I encourage you to use what you learn in this tutorial to create your own space masterpiece. I started with a 1280 x 720 pixel document for this tutorial.

Space Scene in Photoshop

Stars | Large Planet | Clouds | Small Planets

Video

Stars

Creating the basic stars for your scene is actually quite simple. By creating a custom brush, we can create a nice starfield within minutes. Making sure you’re working on a new layer, grab your Brush Tool from the Tools Bar. To customize our brush, we need to open our Brush Panel. If yours is not already open, activate it by going to Windows > Brush. We’re looking to create a tiny, scattering brush. Here are the settings.

Your brush is complete. A few things to note:

- You’re free to adjust the brush size if you want bigger/smaller stars.
- Shape Dynamics allows us to create different sized stars with each stroke.
- Scattering, well, scatters your stars around the canvas as you brush.
- Transfer, or “Other Dynamics” in earlier versions of PS, allow for stars with different Opacities.

Brushing on your canvas will produce scattered stars. It may take a moment or two to fill up your whole document, but you should end up with a result like this:

Yes, it’s a very basic starfield. As we add additional elements to our scene, the stars will become less of the focus.

Continue to create the large planet!

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