Create a Burst in the Nebula Effect in Photoshop

Apologies for not making as many tutorials as I’m suppose to, during last month. Anyways, today I have something special for you. You’ll learn one new commands which I haven’t featured before: Pixel Coordinates. And we’ll also use ‘wind’ filter in a very unique manner.

This tutorial is mainly for intermediate to advanced users, but hey, beginners should also give it a try, I mean if one doesn’t try for the advanced level, how can he progress.

I used an image of a desert and converted into a bursting star… sounds cool? Why don’t you follow this tutorial then, it doesn’t take much time. And last but not the least, I’m anxiously waiting for your comments.

You might also like: Create a Rocking DJ Poster / Wallpaper Design

Resources used:

• Background
• Desert

Final Result

Ground Work

Once you have the background opened, go to File>Place and open the desert image. I scaled the desert image to the required size. Then, select Elliptical Marquee Tool, make a circular selection, then Press CTRL+Shift+I to inverse the selection and press Delete. We just need a circle, if you wanna use any other method to get your circle out, you are free to use that.

Go to Image>Adjustments>Invert. Apply this filter when you Dry Desert layer selected.

Sphere

Now Go to Filter>Distort>Spherize. Set it to 100% and press OK. But apply this filter again, this time the value is of 60%.

Time to Go to Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and adjust the values.

Right now, our planet has sharp edges, not realistic! Go to Eraser Tool Select the Faux Media brush and erase the edges of the circle so it’s not in a uniform condition anymore.

Using Polar Coordinates

This is a command I haven’t used in my tutorials before. Go to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates and adjust according to the values in the image below.

Result after Polar Coordinates. 

Now rotate the image. Go to Image>Image Rotation> 90 Degrees Clockwise. You might be wondering that why are we rotating our image, but you’ll know in just a moment.  

You should get this now. 

Using Wind Effect

Go to Filter>Stylize>Windand set the values. Now you would realize that why we rotated the image earlier.

This is our result. 

Now rotate the image 90 Degrees Counter Clockwise. (basically we just reversed the rotation we made earlier.)

Polar Coordinates, Once Again

Go to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates

Color Balancing

Now our result is almost complete, just one thing left. Adding the magic touch! Go to Image>Adjustments>Color Balance and put these values. This color adjustment will blow your mind. But I’m not showing it in the next screenshot. We need to set color balance for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights.

This is the background we are using, adjust it in whatever fashion you like.

Voila!