Last winter, my wife and I made a visit to Big Apple. It was her first trip ever to New York. On the third day of our trip, we just walked along the Hudson River. Then we met a young Chinese girl. She handed me a camera and asked me to shot a photo of her against the river. I said to her “Smile!” and was going to press the shutter button. Then a huge meteor suddenly came down. I said to her “Hold on. Look, it’s a huge meteor.” But she refused to turn around and insisted that I take the photo.
The following tutorial shows easy steps to design a meteor, using Adobe Photoshop CS3. The photo used in this tutorial comes from Webshots.
- Create a new layer.
- Using Elliptical Marquee Tool and Polygonal Lasso Tool, make a horizontally-long selection.
- Fill the selection with an orange color.
- Using Elliptical Marquee Tool, make several horizontally-long selections filled with different colors.
- Apply to the entire layer Blur > Gaussian Blur.
- Use Liquify and smudge the colors.
- Apply Gaussian Blur to the layer again.
- Create a new layer.
- Make a selection and apply Refine Edge > Feather.
- Fill the selection with sheer black and then apply Noise > Add Noise.
- Apply Gaussian Blur to the layer.
- Apply a layer style and enable Bevel and Emboss.
- Apply Adjustments > Hue/Saturation to layer and colorize the ball.
- Make duplicates of the first layer. Change colors and sizes and distort shapes.
- Merge all small flame layers into one and apply Gaussian Blur.
- Finally, apply a layer mask to the big flame layer and cast black-and-white gradation map.
Video tutorial with no audio commentary
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Photoshop CS3 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
