Design an Awesome Space Dancer Scene with Nebula Texture in Photoshop

Posted on June 22nd, 2009 in Photo Effect.

Tags: abstract, adjustment, effect, mask, photo, space, texture

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In this tutorial, I will show you the processes I used to design this awesome space dancer scene with Nebula Texture in Photoshop. The inspiration of the tutorial in fact came from the latest “Prince of Persia” game cover (and yes, I do love this game very much!)

Together we will be using image adjustment options, layer blending, masking and filter effect. I will also like to emphasise that it’s very importance to choose the right stock texture for your design, as they will contribute and improve your final effect dramatically.

This is an fairly easy tutorial and I hope you enjoy it! Have a try!

Here is the preview of the final result:

alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

PSD File for this Tutorial

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OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Dancer

Nebula Texture 1

Nebula Texture 2

Step 1

Load the dancer image into Photoshop and resize the image to 1200px * 1477px. The purpose of resizing image is to make it rough the same size as the textures we’re going to apply on it.

Make a duplication of the background layer, hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B and apply the Black and White adjustment Tool with following settings:

Name this duplicated layer “black and white”. Make another two duplications of this “black and white” layer and change the blending mode of those two duplicated to “Hard Light”.

You will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

Load the “Nebula texture 1″ image into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document. This will create a new layer and let’s name it “nebula texture 1″.

On this “nebula texture 1″ layer, go to Edit > Transform > Free Transform (or Ctrl + T), resize, rotate this layer as you wish, the ultimate goal is to find a position where the outer part of the nebula image is surrounding the model.

When you’re satisfied, right-click this nebula texture 1 layer and choose “create clipping mask”.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we can go on and add some image adjustments layers for the nebula layer, so as to make it more stand-out.

From bottom to top, we add the following image adjustment layers: (make sure you tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option for every one of them)

Color Balance

Levels

On this Levels adjustment layer, apply the following layer mask:

Brightness and Contrast

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 3

Load the “Nebula Texture 2″ into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document and use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl + T) to resize, rotate until it fits into the canvas.

Name this layer as “nebula texture 2″ and change its blending mode to “soft light” and you will have the following effect: (I hide the previous “nebula texture 1″ layer and its related adjustment layers)

To add a bit more contrast to this “Nebula Texture 2″ layer, we can add a Curve Adjustment layer  (Make sure to tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option) with the following settings:

Here is the effect afterwards:

Step 4

Make all layers visible, you image should now look like this:

Now we can do some retouch of the image. I personally feel the colour contrast is a bit too much, so I add another Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer on top of all layers, with the following settings:

You will now have this effect:

You can of course try out other adjustment tools and see what result that bring you.

Step 5

Now we can add some motion into the image. To do this, flatten the image (I would suggest before you flatten the image, save a copy of the existing file, then the save the flattened image as a new psd file), duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and apply the following options:

Change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Screen” and opacity to 80%, you will have the following final effect:

OK, that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are! Remember to always keep your own creativity!

Here is an alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

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