skepnaden on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/skepnaden/art/Universal-Union-8372271skepnaden

Deviation Actions

skepnaden's avatar

Universal Union

By
Published:
1.5K Views

Description

It's done! My fifth (or sixth? (Nebulosa?)) space influenced wallpaper. This one shows a quite popular kind of capture, an collision between planets. Thought I might give it a try, and I think it turned out decent :)

I really put some work into the starfield and the planets. Quite satisfied with the result. It's all made in Photoshop 7.0 with about 40 layers and lots of experimenting :P

Feel free to comment!
Image size
1600x1200px 993.75 KB
© 2004 - 2024 skepnaden
Comments19
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
DigitalPlazma's avatar
There are quite a few problems here...major problems, unfortunately. :(

First, the planet seems to have no particular color at all, and is easily one of the ugliest such planets I've ever seen, frankly. Stick with one color, and make more subtle variations such as blue to cyan, red to yellow, etc. Your stars suffer from the same problem - they're randomly colorized. Yes, some Hubble photos might have different colors, but notice the way they're arranged, and the relationship between those tinges. You can't just randomly smatter the canvas with various highly-saturated colors.

The texture on both focal objects is extremely displeasing. It looks more like mould than topography, so I'd suggest getting a new texture. There are plenty to be had out on the Internet for free - just search. I'd also watch it with the embossing...for one, set the two layers to color dodge and color burn, respectively, and for two, don't feel obligated to use 500% embossing or 100% opacity on the layers...it all depends on the situation. Do what looks good; don't do what you've always done.

The planet's lighting curve is completely ruining the image. Notice that the most realistic, 3D-looking planets are going to have a concave cresent rather than convex, and that the surface is going to get brighter as you move towards the edges. Your inner and outer glow layer styles are way off, especially on the little moon...consult the Greg Martin tutorial again. That moon is also very washed out - again, you have no brightness continuum. There's just black and medium green.

I'm not entirely convinced that you quite spherized enough here....it needs to be roughly 150-160% spherized in order to have the proper curvature. We have here more of a pancake than a planet, at present :( Is the object colliding with the planet spherized enough either? It doesn't look like it, but I'm not toally sure. It looks like it's only 50 or 100% spherized.

You have a composition nightmare here - 75% or more of the canvas is negative space, and there's only one background object. I don't know what to tell you here, except that you would be better off with a very small, cropped image than what you have at present.

A lot of problems here, but these are all errors that can be learned from.