Create flaming meteor

dangtruong

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You are going to apply many Photoshop techniques in order to create a realistic and extraordinary flaming meteor.

First of all you need to open up a new document. File > New

Make this document 400(px) x 400(px) Hit Ok.

Get your paintbucket tool (), change your color picker to black (), and fill your background black:

Now make a new layer, you can do this by going to Layer > New > Layer or clicking the little icon on your layer window:

Now get your ellipse tool:

And changes it options to this:

Change your color picker to white, ([img]images/tutorials/meteor/colorpick2.jpg[/img]), now make a circle by holding shift down (makes it proportional) and clicking and dragging on the screen:

Place your cirle where mine is using the move tool. ([img]images/tutorials/meteor/movetool.jpg[/img])

Now you want to go to Filter > Stylize > Wind, once its options are open, change them to this:

It should now have a little bit of the wind effect. Now hit Ctrl+F to redo the wind effect, do this 3 more times:

Now go to Edit > Free Transform

Now your going to want to tilt the meteor so it looks like its falling, like this:

Now you have to double-click in the middle of the selection to apply the transformation.

Now get your smudge tool out :

Now you want to change the brush size to 12 and the strength to 95%:

Now smudge a line from the white of the meteor up to the top of the streaks, like so:

[img]images/tutorials/meteor/smudgedirect.jpg[/img]

Now you want to change the strength back down to 90%:

Now do the same thing you did with the one smudge only make about 3-4 more around the middle one:

Now turn your strength back down to 50% and make some smudges coming off the side of the meteor:

Now make a new layer. (Layer > New > Layer or [img]images/tutorials/meteor/newlayer2.jpg[/img])

Change your color picker to a light gray:

Now get the elliptical marquee tool:

Your going to make a gray circle within your meteor, hold shift and click and drag this over the meteor making a perfect cirle just inside the meteor. Now fill it with gray:

Now you want to right-click on layer 3 and go to blending options:

Click on bevel and emboss and change the parameters to these:

It should now look like this:

Now you want to right-click on layer 3 and duplicate it:

Now get your elliptical marquee tool out, () and make a little circle on your meteor and press delete on your keyboard. It should look like a hole. These are the craters on your meteor. Repeat this 4-5 times with different size holes in different spots:

Now you want to go back to layer 3’s blending options (right-click on layer 3 > blending options):

Now you want to click on Color Overlay and choose black. (this makes the hole son your meteor look better):

It should look something like this:

Now this part is a little tricky so pay attention. We are going to make it look like there are flames coming over the top of the meteor.

You want to select layer 2:

Now you want to get your zoom tool out ([img]images/tutorials/meteor/zoom.jpg[/img]), Now you want to zoom in on the meteor:

Now you want to get your pen tool out:

Now go to the top under File and change your pen options to these:

Now with your pen, you want to start clicking around the edge, everytime you click in will plot a new point, so click all the way around the bottom edge of the meteor, then connect the points, like so:

I made the points red in that example so you could see. Once you come back around connect your last point to your first point by click on the first point, then right click in the middle of this and go to Make Selection:

Now you should have the marquee around your selection:

Now you want to Hit Ctrl+C to copy the selection

Now make a new layer. (Layer > New > Layer or Click the icon, )

Now Hit Ctrl+V to paste the selection on your new layer. (layer 4)

Now you want to Click and Drag layer 4 up to the top, so its on top of all the layers:

Now you want to get the smudge tool out again:

Set the strength to about 90%:

Now you want to smudge over the meteor:

Do this about 4-5 times, and it starts to look like there is flames coming over the top of it:

Now you want to make a new layer. Layer 5 (Layer > New > Layer or Click the icon, )

Go to your gradient tool:

Now your going to select the violet/orange gradient:

Once you have that selected you what to click and hold at the top left corner of the page and drag it to the bottom right:

Now it should cover your whole page, go over to layer 5 and change the blending options to Color:

Now it should look like this:

Your basically done with this, UNLESS, you want to make it look even better.

Now we are going to TOUCH it up a little bit and also change the color of it if you would like.

Right-click on Layer 3 Copy in the layer menu and go to blending options, click on stroke and change the options to these:

This will make the transition and the holes look better.

Now to make the meteor look a little more like a meteor.

Click the little eye , on all but Layer 3 copy and Layer 3:

Now your picture should only have this:

Now go to Layer > Merge Visible or hit Shift+Ctrl+E on your keyboard.

That should have merged the two layers into one (layer 3 copy)

Now you can click the eyes back in on the other layers (just click the empty spaces where the eyes were):

Now you want to get the smudge tool out again:

Set the strength to about 90%:

Now just smudge from the outsite of the meteor in on the top, this will make the back-end of the meteor not so round:

So now your meteor doesn’t look like a Ritz Cracker.

I noticed that some of the line in the background are a bit sharp so heres my solution:

Choose layer 2 (meteor flames) and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, set the radius to 1.5:

That should clear that up. Now if you want to change the colors of the meteor, select layer 5 or the top layer, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation, hit ok, now play with the Hue mostly…

Now you should be done! Heres what I came up with: