Planet Eclipse Tutorial 2

FINALLY. Here is a tutorial for one of my favorite effects. I know, I know it has been a long time since my last tutorial, but hey, no fear, I am here! Let’s get this started. Put on some cool space music. Juno Reactor will do. My favorite: Pistolero. Grab a coffee, and get to work!! Here we go:

Step 1.
Follow my “3d metal rods tutorial” upto step 5. (See, I mentioned in that tutorial that I would be using that effect in another tutorial).
Check out the image

Step 2.
You should be having a background layer, and one layer with the rectangular brush strokes on it. Select the upper layer, press “Ctrl+T” to free transform it. Just
Reduce its width a little bit. See picture:

Step 3.
Apply a vertical motion blur (Filter>Blur>Motion Blur) with direction 90 degrees and 155px distance.

Step 4.
Zoom out, and make a huge ellipse with the ellipse tool (U), as shown in the figure.
Use a black foreground color. Dont worry too much about the shape or size. It is only a rough guide for the steps ahead…

Step 5.
Now we need to make some adjustments. Select the rectangular bars’ layer and go to “Layer>Layer Masks>Reveal All”. Change forground color to black, and take a large, soft brush (200px, 0 hardness, 20% opacity) and delete some rectangular parts of the bars.

Step 6.
Now to add some color. Go to “Layer>New Fill Layer>Gradient”. Select a multicolor gradient. If you are not getting such an option, click on the little arrow beside the gradient chooser, and select the “Rainbow Set” from the dropdown menu. Or you could make your own gradient. Change angle to 90 degrees, scale to 80%, Blend mode to Overlay.

Step 7.
Now to add the eclipse, ie. the lens flare. Make a new layer, fill it with black. Go to “Filter>Render>Lens Flare”. Use 100% for brightness, 50-300mm Zoom for the lens type. Select Ok, and change the layer’s blend mode to “Screen”.

If it seems too bright, or it is too grayish, press “Ctrl+L” or “Image>Adjustments>Levels” to adjust the levels. See settings from below:

Step 8.
Now to add the planet surface, you will need a picture of the earth’s horizon. I found this using google image search. I hope the owner doesn’t mind. You may find a better picture, so go google it. Make sure it is large enough to cover your canvas. Now add this image to your canvas on a new layer. You will need to rotate and resize it to align it with the ellipse layer.

Change the layer’s blend mode to Screen. By now you may have realized that all that the “Screen” mode does is to remove the dark parts of the layer, and show the light parts over the lower layer. The lighter it is, the brighter it shows.

Step 9.
Again we will use layer masks to do some adjustments. Select the new image layer, and go to “Layer>Layer Masks>Reveal All”. Then using the black brush, delete some parts of the image until you get something similar to:

Step 10.
Now that our image is taking shape, lets add a glow to the planet horizon. Select the ellipse layer, and go to “Layer>Layer styles>Outer Glow”. Use setting shown:

Step 11.
Now the last step is to make the universe more realistic. we will add a star field and some noise to the aurora effect. Create a new layer on top of the others, fill it with black and go to “Filter>Texture>Grain”. Change the Intensity to 66 and the Contrast to 60. After that change the layer’s Blend Mode to Soft Light and 60%. You will notice that the image will get a bit darker.

The final image is:

DONE!! You could try some more things like a paper/grunge texture on it, the way it is done on Abduzeedo. (That is where I learnt it. Please do check it out.)But I like it a little more clean and tidy, or I just dont have enough time to do that.
My exams start in 3 days!! Wish me luck!!