Life Through a Lens

Happy Almost Spring! Well, today is the first full day of Daylight Savings Time here in most parts of the United States so I thought I would create a little reminder for those who, 1. forget to change their clocks every year and 2. forget which way to turn the clock. For those of you who don’t recognize Daylight Savings Time, this will be a pretty basic tutorial on how to create planets from scratch.

Today’s post is actually going to be a multi-step tutorial where, with the end product, you’ll have created an Earth, a moon (well a, “moon like thingy”),  a point of light and wrapped text all in Photoshop.

A note- this is a pretty basic tutorial but it does require a working knowledge of Photoshop. I’ll try to be as detailed as possible but it definitely helps to understand where everything is and have a basic understanding of layering and what functions each of the tools perform.

Let’s start with creating the Earth… (feeling pretty powerful… who knew I could do that?)

1. Start with a Background

I created a 3000 x 2400 document (which I ultimately reduced for the photo at the beginning) but you can really create one as large or small as you want. I just went with what I feel most comfortable with. Once you’ve created it, fill it with Black.

2. Create a perfect circle with the Elliptical Marquee Tool

Create a new layer and call it something like, “Earth”. Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, and holding down the shift key (to create a perfect circle), create a circle about two inches from the top, dead middle. (Remember, in the end, there will be other elements to this piece so you need to make sure you have room.) If you need to, hold the space bar down while dragging (along with the Shift key) and that will allow you to change the location of your ellipsis until it’s right where you want it. You should have something that looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

3. Color in your world…

You want to set your foreground and background colors to two colors that best depict Earth, blue and green. I went with #067b1c for Green and #1e4fb4 for Blue. (You could really pick any two you’d like, I just found these to be the most subtle while still “showing up” well.) Set the foreground to green and the background to blue and, with the ellipsis still selected go to Filter>Render>Clouds.

You’ll end up with something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

4. Spherize the world…

Christopher Columbus proved the world is round, and, while there might still be some stragglers out there who still believe it’s flat, for the purposes of this tutorial, let’s just pretend we’re all on the same page. With the marching ants still going (your elliptical outline) go to Filter>Distort>Spherize, make sure your selections match the following and click OK.

Hit Ctrl-F a few times until it starts to look more like land surrounded by a lot of water, like so:

That’s just the first part of creating the Earth… now we’re going to add some light and some glow to make it look more three-dimensional.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. It’s all about the atmosphere…

Let’s create some atmosphere around our Earth to give it a more realistic feel.  Create a new layer above the Earth layer and name it something like, “Earth’s Atmosphere” (we’ll be creating a second sphere later so you’ll want to note the difference).  With the selection still made (if you aren’t seeing the marching ants, Ctrl-Click on the Earth icon in the layers palate.) Make sure your new “atmosphere” layer is selected and go to Edit>Stroke. I chose the same green color as I used on the Earth with a Width of 20 px (don’t be scared by what this creates… we’ll tame it with some blurring in a minute)

Make sure your settings are as shown and click OK:

You’ll end up with something like this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Blur the Blob…

Since the Earth doesn’t have a large layer of green slime around it, let’s tame that blob a bit with some Gaussian Blur.

Deselect your Earth by hitting Ctrl-D (or going to Select>Deselect), make sure your Atmosphere layer is selected and go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Select the following settings and click OK:

You should see a very faint, green haze around the Earth. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t create good atmosphere) You should end up with a hazy green circle around your Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

7. Let there be light…

It’s been raining here for about four days… I don’t know about you, but I could use some sunlight. Adding some lighting effects will help us create a more three dimensional feel to our Earth. Here’s where you need to decide which direction you want your light coming from. This is ultimately going to dictate where you place the light burst coming up. If you look at my final piece, I’ve decided to have my light coming from the top left. To accomplish this, do the following:

Click on your Earth Layer and select Filter>Render>Lighting Effects. You’ll get a dialog box that looks like this:

If you want your lighting to come from the top left like mine, just set yours up the same way but feel free to play around… you are, after all creating the world. Ultimately, you’ll have the sunburst coming from one direction and the moon on the opposite side. To really play this one up, I wanted a stronger light on the one side than the other so I pulled my light source pretty close to the top left side.

Once you’re all set up, click okay and you should have something similar to this (Just a note, I ended up using Brightness/Contrast to tweak the lighting a little and moved my Earth down a bit, as there will be text added later):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. There was the Earth, The Moon and, of course, the stars…

Now, our space beyond the Earth is looking a little, well, blah. Watch any space movie or documentary and you know there is all sorts of stuff floating around out there so let’s add some space debris and stars with a little noise.

Go to your Background Layer which should be filled with Black (if it’s not, make certain your foreground color is set to black and hit Alt-Backspace). Select Filter>Noise>Add Noise and choose a setting that provides a decent amount of noise without going overboard… somewhere around 25-30%. Make sure your distribution is Gaussian and the noise is Monochromatic (you don’t want colorful debris, you want it to be monochrome) and hit OK.

This is a little too much noise so let’s calm it down a little by using levels to bring down the midtones. I chose to bring the midtone down to about .30. Don’t let the preview deceive you… it might look like you’re left with nothing however click OK and you’ll see that’s not the case. You should end up with faint stars/space debris floating all around your background and in the atmospheric haze.

9. The Earth is Organic…

The Earth is organic and should take on a dreamier more ethereal effect with moving water and ridges for the land. To do this, let’s add a little plastic wrap shall we? Make sure your Earth layer is selected and go to Filter>Artistic>Plastic Wrap. You don’t want to overdo this effect, just provide a little bit of a ripple effect to your Earth to give it some more dimension. These are the settings I chose:

You should end up with something like this:

Viola, you have created the Earth. Now don’t you feel powerful??  Go ahead and create a moon using the same steps as above, only much smaller dimensions and, of course, different colors. I ended up choosing  #b06942 for my foreground color and #56370b for the background and liked the effect. I also chose not to Spherize the moon because adding the clouds gave it the exact effect I wanted, and, instead of using plastic wrap, I chose the Watercolor effect under Filter. You might choose otherwise. Play around with it and see what you come up with.

 

10. Turn on the light…

Well the Earth has light beaming down on it so we must have a light source somewhere. So, let’s add some sun. Assuming you chose to light yours from the same direction as mine, I’m going to add my light beam at the very top left corner of my piece. To do this, I chose an asterisk like light beam brush… you can find them online just by Googling them or create your own. (I found mine here, from LadyVictoire on DeviantArt. I used a size of 1800 pixels…you could go smaller, or larger, if you’d like)

Add a layer above all others and name it something like, “The Sun.” Make sure your foreground is white (or some other very light color) and place the sunbeam somewhere in the top corner. I elected to show only half the light beam, as if the rest of the sun is somewhere we can’t see it. It looks something like this:

The best thing about doing everything on separate layers is that you can move them around freely, you can resize them or you can completely scrap them without disrupting the rest of your work. I actually ended up reducing the size of the moon layers slightly and moving them a little closer to the bottom right to balance out the layout a little.

 

 

 

 

11. Give it a glow…

Let’s give the sun some glow so that it’s not just a plain white brush. Double click on the Sun layer so that you bring up the layer styles box. I added both an Inner Glow and an Outer glow to my sun, in a mix of pale yellow and orange to give it a more colorful, realistic feel:

Again, play around with settings to make it look exactly the way you want it to. I actually ended up moving my sun a little more and ended up with this:

OK, you could leave it here and just wrap it up but, I’m going to continue on and show you how I added wrapped text around my Earth.

There are probably many ways to do this, this is just how I learned it and it works for me.

12. A little written word…

We could just add text at the top and the bottom of the piece but why not wrap it around the Earth to give it a more unique effect? It’s not difficult, we’re just going to create a work path using our Elliptical Marquee tool again. To accomplish this, I first selected my Earth layer and, with the Elliptical marquee tool selected and the Shift key held down (again, so you know you’ll get a perfect circle) I created an ellipsis slightly larger than the Earth and atmosphere combined.

Go to your Paths tab (if you don’t have it set up in your workspace, go to Window at the top and make sure the paths tab is checked off. Using the drop down box at the top right of the Paths tab, select “Make Work Path,” choose a tolerance of 1.0 pixel and click OK. You’ll end up with something like this:

Note that the marching ants stop marching and turn in to a solid white line around your Earth and, at the top right corner, under the Paths tab, you’ll see a work path created.

13. Add your text

With the work path still selected, select the Horizontal Type Tool (hit the letter T) and, move your cursor over the work path, to the place where you want to start your text. When you hover your cursor over the work path, you’ll see a wavy line through the middle of it. Click on the place you want to start adding text and start typing.  I chose a font called, “Evolution” (found here), size 45 pt and selected a white font (as I’ll be adding some color to it later) Once you’ve typed your first line, hit Enter or click the check box at the top. From here, you can Free Transform it and move it around if it’s not in the exact spot you’d like. I and ended up with this:

Your work path should still be showing at this point but we’re going to want to flip the bottom line of text do that people don’t have to stand on their head to read it. We can use the original work path to create a selection which we’ll then expand to create a new work path. Sound complicated? It’s not…

14. Creating a new, larger, work path…

First, click on the original work path on the Paths tab and, going to the drop down at the top right, choose “Make Selection” It will ask you your tolerance and I chose 0 pixels. This will bring back your marching ants.

Next, with the marching ants in full march, go to Select>Modify>Expand and choose how many pixels you want to expand by. For my particular font, knowing that I will want to flip the letters so that they are upright but still in line with the rest of the text, I chose to expand by 70 pixels. (Yours may be a little different, depending on the font you chose.) Once you click okay, you’ll see your original work path as well as the marching ants which will be expanded out from the original path.

Now, go back to your Paths tab, go to the drop down menu and select, “Make Work Path” This will create a new work path for your second line of text. It should look like this:

Now follow the same steps you did for the first line of text. Once you have the text in place, make sure that text layer is still selected and go to Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontal. You should end up with something that looks like this:

I do challenge you to play around with your settings, your font, your font size, the Free Transform tool, etc. You can move the paths for each of the lines of text until the text is just where you want it, as well as use the Free Transform tool to adjust size and location.

  

  

  

  

15. Needs a little Style…

OK, I don’t know what yours looks like but my text is totally boring. I’m going to spike it up a bit with some Layer Styles… I chose a little Outer Glow, some Color Overlay and some Bevel and Emboss action but you can use whatever suits you.

And, viola! We’re done!  Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and won’t be afraid to use what you’ve learned to try out different things… Enjoy!

*tracey*