Hello and welcome to this tutorial from adobenicnacs.tk. In this tutorial, I’m going to be showing you how to make the next of our planets in our planet scene which is the Earth-like planet. It looks a little bit like the Earth.
So what we’re going to do, like always, we’re going to go to file, new, use my large wallpaper preset, press OK, and we’re going to invert the colors of the background there by holding Ctrl-I. So we start off with a black canvass.
Then, what we’re going to do is we’re going to create a new layer and we’re going to go grab our circular marquee tool, and we’re going to hold Shift and drag out a perfect circle. Just drag the circle, Shift and not hold down anymore, and bring into the center. And we’re going to go to filter, render clouds, and we need to go filter. I’m going to take this to filter gallery. And now in the filter gallery, there are lots of different sections we could go into. But the one we want is I think in—I’m just going to find it. We’ve got this file, I’m just checking all these different effects out because although they won’t create the earth effect, they’ll create some very interesting effects in themselves. So I’m just going to run through a couple of them quickly to try and find it. And see, here it is. There are a couple of similar ones here, like the half notepaper because the one we want is plaster. You could just play with the image balance here to get the required amount of land, so little lands, so you can go up to really lots and lots of land.
We want to sort of balance them out, so I’m going to settle at that. That will do. And then, we’re going to press OK. Then, what we need to do is go to filter, distort, spherize. Spherize it for 100% and then hold the Ctrl key, press F to do it again. Then hold Ctrl-D to deselect. Then, what we need to do is quickly color it, so we’re going to hold Ctrl—no, I don’t want to actually do that. We’re going to use the adjustments panel in Adobe Photoshop CS4. If you don’t have this, all you have to do is click down here. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to choose the colors adjustment. And what will happen is you get that there, as you can see there, what appears over here. But if you do have CS4, one thing you could do is find the colors on here and just click on it, and this palette here like I say will appear in the middle of the screen. So you can follow on from that.
So what we want to do is we’re going to red, maybe drag the red down a bit, and then play with the blue value, maybe bring it up, just sort of get the tone you want, or you could even bring down some of the green lights in it. And then, what I’m going to do is not on this. I’m just going to press back here and then I’m going to go to levels adjustment. So what you’d want to do here is if you don’t have CS4, just click here and choose levels. So I’m going to find the level we want, there it is. I’m just going to bring blacks in and play with my gamma slider, which is the gray one here, to sort of give it the tone I want. I’m quite happy with that, but you might want it slightly differently. That’s up to you.
Then, what we need to do is create a new layer and use again our magic wand tool. We may need to play with the tolerance here and first of all, you need to make sure you’re on—I should have said this a minute ago—on the planet layer. You’re just going to click on one of the black areas. And if you seem to select most of it, that will do, then hold your shift key. Click on one of the black areas, shift key, click another, shift key, click another one, and then that one, and then that one, and then so forth for all your different black spots. And so, what you’d probably want to do is take a bit more time of this. I zoomed in and took it to quite depth, but this will do for now. So then, we’re going to go back to that top layer we created. We’re going to filter, render, clouds, and then what we have to do is hold Ctrl-D and then what we want to do is go to image adjustments and then choose Curves. And then what we want to do is just drag up our green slider here and just play with the value until you get something that you like. That will do for me.
I’m not going to make it very tough for time’s sake. And what you’ve just seen there is two different ways you can apply curves to effects. And so, the first way is doing adjustment layers. But the way that the adjustment layer works is it will apply this effect to anything below it. So first, you create a new layer and then I draw out another circle here. I’ll fill it with clouds, and then drag it below my adjustment layer. You see, this also turns blue. So that’s one advantage of adjustment layer. Now, it would have probably been better to just—for the planet layer when turning it blue to go to image adjustments curves, but I just wanted to show you how you could use adjustment layers. So now, we’ve got this.
What we want to do is hold Ctrl-T to transform it, and in the width, we’d want to enter a width for 101 and then 101 here. It doesn’t actually do much but it’s sort of gives it a more three-dimensional effect. And then just press the tick and you’re done, so you can see the before and then the after. You can see that it definitely gives extra depth to it.
And so, I think that our Earth planet is done. So if we could just check back. All we got to do now is add our lighting effects. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to highlight all these layers. I’m just going to merge them by holding Ctrl-E and I’m going to go to filter, render, lighting effects. And then, we know our light is coming from up there, you can just play with it, whatever you want here. Press OK. That will do for me.
What we need to do now is save it out and it’s in our solar system, file structure, planets, and it’s in Photoshop documents, and we’ll call this Earthish Planet. Save it, maximum compatibility checked, press OK. Ctrl-Shift-S up on level into jpeg, Earth planet, and then set the file type to jpeg. Save and you might want to play around with the quality, but 12 is fine for me. Press OK and we are done.
So thanks for watching this tutorial. I hope you’ll be tuning in to watch the rest of the tutorials. I’ll just hide Skype—not Skype, sorry, Twitter. It’s okay, there’s no need to correct me in the comments. Anyway, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you’ve been following along the series and making all these planets. So the next tutorial, we’ll be continuing this and making the next of our planets. But until then, thanks for watching.
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