For the purposes of the feathering values, its important to have the same size canvas. mine was A4, in landscape, at 300 dpi, which is large, but I always make things that res in case I want to print.

Fill a circle:

Make a load of horizonal selections over it using the square marqee tool. Hold shift while selection to 'add' to selections. Then feather the selections by 20 pixels.

This is where it began to go peculiar. I may change this part, but it could still be useful for technique.

This is the hard bit, as I kinda forgot exactly what I did. I basically found a swirly marble texture, desaturated it, filled an identical circle over the planet, and then randomised it a bit using the liquidise tool. This is what I got:

I then turned up the contrast, and adjusted the levels so the white bits are darker grey, and the dark bits are nearly black. I then changed the blending mode to overlay and the opacity to 40%. Also you can copy your planet layer and use the chrome filter on it, se the blending mode to soft light, and reduce the opacity, to make some very fine striping. I think thats all I did to it at this stage...should now look similar to this:

Now for the really hard bit. flatten the three planet layers together, and then duplicate it. Select the top one, and go to liquify in the filters menu. experiment with the various tools. I used the rotate swirly one to make my gas giant spots, and I ran the wavey one along my bands to make them more random. look at a picture of jupiter to see what kind of effects we're looking for. After that, use the airbrush to make little spots, and gently use the dodge and burn tools to tweak colours and make the planet more varied. I ended up with this:

Finally, add an outer glow and inner glow using one of the light peach colours in your planet. I made one lot on a 100% opacity, flattened the effects, and then added some much more transparent ones as well to add depth. This is what I came up with:

This doesn't take you all the way there though. you may want to spherise it a bit after this, and add a shadow, depending on where the light is coming from. There are plenty of tutorials to be found on making star fields and texturing rock planets to be found on the net

quote:

---

Originally posted by Funkenstein:
consider this used! my current spacescapes are pretty terrible!
thanks jats

~Dr.Funkenstein~

---

glad it was useful. you might find these two tutorials useful for spacescapes too. It has a good star field one, and one for rocky planets.
http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tutorials.html

he's very good at spacescapes that guy