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Making a Sun in Photoshop
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Creating a Sun:
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1.
Check out this sun-like
image I created in Photoshop. Manfred Mann explained why we can't look directly at the sun, but the
view I was trying to create was like some I'd seen where we actually see details and the sun looks
orange-yellow. I didn't know what this view was called so I did some research and here's what I
learned.
A spectroheliogram is a photograph the surface of the sun in a single wavelength of light, usually one corresponding to a chief element contained in the sun, e.g., hydrogen. |
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 2.
Okay,
spectroheliogram it is.
Anyway, I started out with a 7" x 7", 200 ppi file (the size and resolution you choose will , of course, depend upon your needs). Next, I filled the area with the bubble pattern you see to the left. It comes with the Patterns in Photoshop 6.0.
To the left you see a magnified shot showing the detail after I chose Image: Adjust: Hue/Saturation. I checked the colorize button there, and played with the hue, saturation, & lightness sliders until I had the "orange-ish" color I wanted. |
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 3.
Next I scaled the whole
area down.
Below left, you can see my black background showing through after I chose Edit: Transform: Scale and shrunk everything (while holding down the shift key) into the upper left of the canvas. |
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 4.
Time for a filter to get
the three-dimensional effect.
Choose Filter: Distort: Spherize, and you'll see something like what I did to the left (the amount was 100%). |
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 5.
Here I took the
elliptical marquee and dragged a circle (hold Shift while dragging) around the area you saw in the last image. After that, I chose Select: Inverse and hit the Delete key. |
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 6.
That looked nice but in
order to create a rougher, blurrier edge, I duplicated the layer, enlarged it slightly and chose
Select: Modify: Border. I specified a width, in pixels, for my border (this will depend on the resolution & size of your file). I feathered the selection by a few pixels and selected the inverse area. After deleting the inverse area, this is what I saw (with the original layer hidden). |
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 7.
After making the original layer visible
again, this is what my home-made sun looks like. Pretty decent.
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 8.
In an alternate method
for creating the rough border, I used this brush
(it's one of the Natural Brushes you can load) with the eraser tool to erase portions of the edge. Here's a portion of the area I worked on. |
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 9.
Here's part of that
alternate "sun" I created. My goal here was to make the "bubbles" within the surface smaller. They are but when I did this one, I noticed the bubble pattern is NOT seamless and you see a nasty repeated effect which I thought looked too fake. If I was to do this job professionally, I'd either fix the pattern to look more random and tile seamlessly, or make my own.
Catch some rays! |
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If you have any questions or comments regarding this tutorial please post it in this thread
http://forum.teamphotoshop.com/showthread.php?t=24698
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