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Create A Vibrant Space Nebula

posted by John Owen on August 13th, 2009, in Special Effects | 8 Comments

In this tutorial we are learning how to create a detailed nebula quickly & easily infront of a beautiful starfield. Nebula’s add wonderful structure to space scenes and often give it the final touch.

Here is an example of what we will be creating:

Resources

For this tutorial we will need a starfield, you can download an amazing starfield brushset here: http://rabieshund.deviantart.com/art/Rabies-Star-Brushset-19527557

Step 1 – Getting Started

Create a new document 620×400px or whatever suits you (my document size is small so I can fit the images into this post).

Set the background color as black, create a new layer with the color set as white and start using your new starfield brushset.

Now, it looks pretty bland having the starfield just white, lets make it blueish. Create a new color balance adjustment layer and change the settings to these:

Outcome of step 1:

Step 2 – Nebula Structure

Most nebulas don’t have bright colors, however I used the selection of colors below:

Create a new layer and start off by selecting the brush tool, default round brush with a hardness of 0%. Choose some colors and create something like this:

Earlier when I talked about the colors, you can use white to bring out some colors when it is blurred. Gaussian blur the layer till you can see all the colors merged together. It will be different for everyone.

Before I go any further i’m going to tell you about the blending options for this tutorial. Every nebula you create will be different in color, and depending on how you want your nebula to look you need to chose the right blending modes. I will tell you what i’m choosing but experiment and chose whats best for your nebula/space scene.

Set the blending mode of the nebula layer to ‘Hard Light’.

Step 3 – Nebula Definition

At the moment the nebula looks pretty bland. So for the first step we will create an overall random definition for the nebula. Create a new layer and make a selection of the nebula layer:

Press D on your keyboard to set your color palette to their original colors (B&W). With the new layer selected go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Then set the definition layer to ‘Overlay’.

Step 4 – Detailed Definition

Now we need to create some rifts in our nebula, to achieve this we will use the Burn, Dodge & Smudge tools. Start experimenting with using these tools on both layers to create some cool effects.

You can also use the brush tool with black & white with different opacitys & flows. These are the key ingredients to creating a good nebula.

Now lets add some particles to our nebula, use the same colors as the nebula + white etc.. Use small sparsed out brushes to create a dusty effect.

Step 5 – More Nebulas

Now, create more nebulas, experiment more and put some planets etc. Merging nebulas is also a good way to make them look even better.

Conclusion

If you have any questions just post a comment and i’ll answer as best as possible. Here are some examples of amazing nebulas.

http://magoopv.deviantart.com/art/Planets-e-nebulas-108247004
http://-kol.deviantart.com/art/Quattuor-123655781
http://pigou.deviantart.com/art/Nebulas-v2-13600746