Photoshop Tutorial

Tetsuo_Shima

Tetsuo_Shima

In Cryo Sleep
Macca said:
Enjoy, feedback welcomed.
Click to expand...

Read: rep please ;) and I'm happy to oblige :D Thanks for the tutorial, Maccer. I'ma still gonna try my own designs in Bryce, I'm trying to experiment with new ideas at the moment, but certainly I'll give the photoshop ones a go. They'll probably be more complicated than the Bryce ones :D Also, regarding my Bryce tutorial, I'll try and have it done ASAP, but I experienced some technical difficulties *cough* Working on it!
 
Macca

Macca

Member
Tetsuo_Shima said:
Read: rep please ;) and I'm happy to oblige :D Thanks for the tutorial, Maccer.
Click to expand...

Haha, na when I meant Feedback I mean like Good points, bad points on the tutorial so I can make things better for next time :p, but I won't say no if your offering rep :p.
 
Iron_fist

Iron_fist

Super Moderator
Staff member
oohh so that's what Cinema4D is used for right i think you have given me a different project to look at from this than i intended...

the tutorial as a whole was pretty well done, though you could tell when you missed the step to make a habitable planet as you seemed to start waffling a bit till you got back on track but appart from that there were a few concepts that i knew in theory but had never put into practice so i definatly piced up a few interesting things

Well done and thanks :D
 
E

elDiablo

Guest
That's actually pretty damn good! The one thing I would say is to watch out for the shadow. Your image has a straight shadow across the world, meaning that the light source (or "Star" as it's technically known) is so much vastly bigger than the planet that it shines on more than half the planet :)

All you have to do is add some curves to your shadow near edges of the planet to give the effect of a 3/4 moon.

If you can understand any of this rambling! Still, looks good!
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Macca,

First, thank you very much for this tutorial. I've not followed it through in Photoshop but I've watched the section on making planets and that was extremely useful.

You've asked for some feedback so here it is. (Caution: my feedback comes raw and two-fisted as I believe that detailed, constructive feedback is crucial.)

Good points:

  • Use of textures. It seems to me that having some decent textures may be essential to the results.
  • Linear dodge. Seems to be the filter of the gods. ;)
  • Practical presentation. Not just "only what you need to see" but also the mistakes and oddities that turn up while you're working.
  • Say and do. If you do something, you say it as you do it so I'm not left guessing what it is that you're clicking on.
  • Best practices. Naming layers, different key combinations, textures from Google, etc.
  • Tweaking the results. Side by side, the tutorial planet didn't look as good as your original and initially that was a little disappointing... but then you started tweaking with contrast/brightness/colour and I could start to see how you refined a middling result to really improve it.

Things that could improve:

  • Couldn't read the top menu when you clicked on it. I just saw the menu appear.
  • Not enough "why". Plenty of what you were doing but I don't necessarily understand the choices. Perhaps that's out of scope for this sort of tutorial, though.
  • A little quick in places. Once or twice your mouse was moving too quickly for me to follow; a window would appear, you'd do something, then it'd disappear again. Obviously I can rewatch and/or pause the movie but it spoils the flow a little.
  • Reverse presentation. You'd do something, explaining what you're doing as you go along, then tell us the results as we can see the results appear. Presentations benefit from telling us the expected results before you start making the changes, then the final step shows us the expected result (or starts a discussion on why we've not got there yet).

I've not watched the bit on signatures as it was the planets that really interested me. I'll try to get some time to play with the techniques this weekend. :)

Thanks again!
 
Macca

Macca

Member
Thats exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for RS :D. It means that I can see what I'm doing good, and what I need to improve on for my next one.

Thanks for all the constructive critisicm and comments.

I'm thinking of doing another one soon, maybe one on something a bit bigger, like my tiger collage or something like that. Any Ideas?
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Macca said:
I'm thinking of doing another one soon [...] Any Ideas?
Click to expand...

Yep. Planets that are more than a single colour, e.g. Earth. Might be super easy, but I can't see from what you've shown so far how I get from a single tone textured planet to one with two/three tones (e.g. blue oceans, green land, white ice caps).

Also...

Suns. I can see how I might make a planet that is bright yellow with no shadow, or something, but luminescent stellar bodies feel to be something more than that (perhaps?), probably because they have a "radiance" to them. Or is it a glow? Not sure what but somehow people make stuff look bright and radiant and I don't know how. :)

That'd do for starters! At your option, of course.
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
The sun part i could do probably, the habitable planets aka multi coloured, Ronin make a couple of layers, and different coloured brushes with the texture you want then use some blending to mix it up! :) I could try it, but right now im poking other stuff :D


*edit* i had a go .. this was a slight failure because of the texture i used imho

Planet_two.png
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
Also ... a Sun attempt is

here

You can change the colour of the Shadows , mid tones and highlights if you use a colour balance layer at the end and select the three radio buttons at the bottom ( i've used it before to change the colour of cloud areas )

i.e. a slight change here
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, I like KC's best. ;)

Those sun pictures are really cool, Trax. Shame about the "seam" on the texture but, conceptually, they're really neat. :)
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
yeah, I've noticed that when ever I've used a texture those lines seem to appear, I'll work on how to get rid of those ...
 
Tetsuo_Shima

Tetsuo_Shima

In Cryo Sleep
Suns are easier to do in Bryce, I made a couple of half decent pictures before where I had a planet's shadow in the foreground illuminated by a bright sun behind but I binned them because I thought sun pictures were worthless (but I was wrong, evidently).
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Broadly, I'm wanting to cover:

  • Non-habitable planets that look interesting
  • Habitable looking planets
  • Rocks (i.e. planets that are just dust and rock, like our moon)
  • A small number of weird looking planets
  • Asteroids (as a small collection)
  • Gas Giants
  • Stars (in various colours)
  • Gas clouds

It's not wholly an artistic endeavour, though, as I'm being guided by what we already know about these things in astronomy or astrophysics.

However, I'm running out now so I'll field questions on that later.
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Traxata said:
I will say, How many of what types, i.e. do you mean a system similar to ours ?
Click to expand...

I don't know yet. :)

From one perspective it'd make sense to use the Sol system as a base for proportions but I think I'd aim to double or triple the proportion of habitable planet pictures so that there was more potential for variation.

In particular, I'm thinking that there's also a wider variety of "habitable" planets than our little blue-green rock. Some primarily water (think Waterworld), some primarily land (think some sort of uber-rainforest), some heavily ice (think Hoth), some large deserts (think Arrakis), some barely habitable (think LV-426 or Fury 161)... that sort of variety. Need to create space for those but still have variety in the planets that are less "interesting" to players.

It strikes me that Macca's atmosphere technique could be removed for planets that don't have an atmosphere. I wonder if that would visibly make the planets look less inviting but still cool to look at?

Also worth bearing in mind that final usage sizes are probably in the 40-80 pixel range, though having large masters is always a good idea.

(By the way, you guys rock. :) )
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
Hehe I know Ronin I know :p I'll try a little harder at the green-blue planets using multiple colours to try and get ice patches for the poles, and continents but the easiest ones will be solid colour planets,

If Tets can make a nice sun in Bryce, ( i'm yet to attempt planets in that yet ) because i know that they'll probably look alot better than the photoshop variants.

I'm also going to work on the Texture issue with the lines appearing on the planet surfaces, i noticed it ever so slightly on Macca's planet too,

-note- I forgot to post this and had a play :p i'm working out how to fix these texture lines now


EDIT - I came across this website : http://www.simplystrata.com/earthTutorial.html while looking for some textures
 
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