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Making a Sun in Photoshop



Creating a Sun:
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.

 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.

 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.

 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%).
 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.
 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).
 7.
After making the original layer visible again, this is what my home-made sun looks like. Pretty decent.
   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.
 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!

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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