With this tutorial I am going to show you a way to create a nice glowing planet (sphere) effect. Here is an example
1. Start by creating a new document 40*40 pixels. Get the Paint bucket tool and fill it with a light blue color. Then with the Elliptical Marquee tool and select a perfet circle (hold down Shift while selecting) at the center of your document and fill it with white. You should now have an image like this.
2. Go to Edit -> Define Pattern and give your pattern a name. (If you want you can use the image above)
3. Close this document and create a new one with a size of 800*800 pixels.
4. Select the Paint Bucket Tool (Fill: Pattern) and fill your new document with the pattern we ‘ve just created.
5. Get the Elliptical Marquee tool and select a circle at the center of your document.
6. Go to Filter -> Distort-> Spherize and use Amount: 100% Mode: Normal.
7. Now we are going to inverse the selection. Go to Select -> Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+I). Fill the new selection with black and deselect (Ctrl+D)
8. Go to Filter-> Distort-> Polar Coordinates and select Polar to Rectangular. You should now have something like this.
9. Go to Image -> Rotate Canvas -> 90CW
10. Filter -> Stylize -> Wind and use these settings.
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11. Repeat step 10 until you have something like this.
12. Now we are going to rotate our image back to its original orientation. Image -> Rotate Canvas -> 90CCW.
13. We are going to use the Polar Coordinates filter once again, however this time we are going to use the Rectangular to Polar setting. (Filter->Distort->Polar to Rectangular).
We are almost done. All we have to do now is to modify the colors to our liking. I used a Gradient Map (Image -> Adjustments ->Gradient Map) and here is my final result.
PS: The technique used to achieve this effect is based on the Exploding Planet Tutorial from Tutorialwiz
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