Hello and welcome to this tutorial from adobenicnacs.tk and in this tutorial, we’re going making the last of our planets in our solar system scene. So I’m just going to warn you, this tutorial, I might have to rush on through it slightly because there’s a lot to do. If worse come to worst, it will end up being in two parts.

So let’s begin. I’m to go to file, new, as always, large wallpaper preset and press OK. We’re going to invert the colors of the background by holding Ctrl-I to make it black, and then create a new layer. And using our circular marquee tool and holding Shift, we’re going to drag out a perfect circle. So you’re going to drag this roughly into the center. Then, we’re going to go to filter, render, clouds, filter, filter gallery, and we’re going to use the glass setting. Let me just zoom out here. And you can always play with these settings but I’m just going to leave them at the current default, which is for me distortion 5, smoothness 3, texture frosted and scaling 100%. Press OK. Then I’m going to go to filter, distort, spherize. The amount will be 100%, I’m going to press OK and hold Ctrl-F to repeat the effect. Hold Ctrl-D to deselect.

Now, I’m going to go to image, adjustments, and curves. I’m going to take our red value and take it down to increase the cyan, and we’re going to take our blue value, just bring it up slightly at a new point. If you want to get rid of a point, you can just drag it off. Let’s just play with this value. I quite like that. Press OK.

So now, we got our planet. What we have to do now is the ring, so then we’re going to press new layer, then I’m going to go to filter, render, clouds. And then, what we need to do is go to filter, distort, I’m going to fit this 12. What we just do about here, we just stretch the amount up to 100 or 999 degrees, press OK. And this is the bases of our ring.

So now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to be using a tablet so this would look clear. I will bring off my tablet and I’m going to close Windows Live Journal. So then, what we’re going to do is grab our eraser tool. Now, you don’t need a tablet to this. Make sure you got the eraser, not the background eraser. You do not need one but it might be a bit easier. It’s quite possible with the mouse, and I’m just going to increase the size of it using my curly bracket tool and square bracket. And then make sure it’s soft-edged, and then just erase it out. What you might want to do is go into your brushes palette, make sure of the shape and this is off if this is on. Make sure—although you might be quite be tempted to do lots of little strokes because if you do might mess up, then you’re going to lose everything you’ve done up to that point. So make sure you don’t move your top panel in or away. Just work your way around. And what we’re going to do, we’re just going to raise the edge here and then after we’ve erased the edge, we’re going to compress it in slightly, so that will do for now.

Then, I’m going to hold Ctrl-T and we’re just going to scale it to make it more circular. Press Enter, and then we’re just going to erase out the middle here. And then, just pick a more bright line and just—although it’s like—I forgot what it is, it’s like a twirl, a spiral that’s it. That’s not really spiral, but you know what I mean, a cone which goes in and in and in. Just try to follow it and make it to a perfect circle. That will do for now I think.

Then, we need to hold Ctrl-T and just drag it in, move it over here, drag it out, and then I’m just going to press Enter and I’m going to scale our planet down. Press Enter, and then uncheck that if you actually did that. Hold Ctrl and press minus just to zoom out here, and then I’m just going to bring this out slightly. Press Enter, and then hold Ctrl-A to select everything and then you should click your move tool and just click these buttons up here to center it. And likewise with the bottom layer, make sure that you select the bottom layer. Hold Ctrl-D and what we’re going to do is grab our eraser again and just erase not the planet layer, on the ring layer, just erase our ring. It doesn’t matter if there’s a slight black out there. Actually, I think it makes it look a little bit nicer.

So there we go, there’s our planet and ring. What we have to do now is tone the ring, so I’m going to do exactly the same method, hold Ctrl-M. That will go at image adjustments which you can do with Ctrl-M. Make sure you press the right hot key, which I didn’t. Same thing, drag the red down, increase cyan, take our blue value, boost it up, and then I’m going to go to RGB, just darkening it slightly. Press OK, and then what we need to do is highlight the group. We’ll call it Planet. Hold Ctrl-T and we can just rotate the whole thing and scale it slightly so it fits in our screen. Press Enter. And as you can see, there are a few extra bits of the ring up there, so let’s just grab our eraser and erase that out. Go back to our move to close that, and then all you have to do now is add lighting effects to the main planet, so I’m just doing that. Filter—well, you could do it to the ring. We’ll try it in a minute, but main planet first. Drag our highlight. That should do, press OK, and then we can always try doing lighting effects. We can just use the top one, which is the last one, and I think we’ll keep that.

Then, all we have to do is save it out, Ctrl-Shift-S and then into the tutorial files, solar system, planets, Photoshop documents, Ice Planet, save it. Maximum compatibility checked, press Enter, and then Ctrl-Shift-S up one level into jpeg and save it out as a jpeg. Save quality to your preference, and we are done.

So the next tutorial, we’re going to be taking all of the elements here. We’re going to be combining them and this may spread over one or two tutorials. But in the next few tutorials, we’ll be finishing off our piece. So I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I hope you’d be tuning in to the rest of them. If you like to or on any of my others, please comment, write and subscribe to them.

But other than that, first of all, please check out my site. That’s www.adobenicnacs.tk. I’m currently working on a complete redesign of it, so that should be up and running soon. But that’s the video, thanks for watching.