Ive been looking around at a lot of beautiful photos on Flickr of space and astronomy. Galaxies and Nebulae are just absolutely stunning and pleasing to the eye. It got me thinking if these types of image could be created in photoshop so i started to play around. This is what i came up with so i decided to write a tutorial and share it with you. Enjoy!

Step 1. First open up a new photoshop document and fill the background with either black or any very dark colour. Then on a new layer choose a soft round brush and just randomly paint with a few different colours as i have done below.

Step 2. Now we are going to blur it a little by going Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur and play around till you get something similar to mine below.

Step 3 . Next we are going to adjust the colours a little by going Image - Adjustments - Levels and experiment till you have results to your liking. You can see what i came up with below.

Step 4 . Now create a new layer. Make sure your background and foreground colours are the default black and white and go Filter - Render - Clouds .

Step 5 . Now set your clouds layer to Overlay at with an opacity of 100. You should end up with something like this.

Step 6 . Next duplicate your clouds layer and set its blend mode to Overlay at around 26% .

Step 7 . Now still on your clouds duplicate layer, we are brighten it up a bit by strengthening the output levels. Go Image - Adjustments - Levels and make your settings similar t mine below.

Step 8 . Now we will add a nice starfield to make our image a bit more interesting. First choose a small hard round brush and make all your settings the same as mine.

Now create a new layer and place it immediately above your black background layer. Then just brush all over your image and you will get a nice starfield. Then set your starfields blend mode to screen with an opacity of 77%.

Step 9. Now to add another point of interest to our image we are going to add some nice light effects. I decided to use the ones found in Abduzeedos tutorial Space Lighting Effects in 10 Steps - Photoshop Tutorial . I just created some on a new layer and set the layer to Overlay .

Step 10 . Okay i know a lot of designers despise lens flares but i just thought it would look good on this particular image. Create a new layer, fill it with black and then go Filter - Render - Lens Flare and make one similar to mine. I set the lens flares blend mode to screen. I then place that layer underneath the 2 clouds layers.

Now to finish i just added some text but you could add whatever you want! Here is my final result below. Click for full sized image.