Space Lighting FX

Tutorial used: http://abduzeedo.com/space-lighting-effects-10-steps-photoshop-tutorial

I started with a black background and added a soft radial gradient peeking over the top.

Here I created a new black layer and added RGB lights (Filter > Render > Lighting Effects > RGB Lights)

...now with Gaussian blur.

Another black layer was added on top with the blending set to Screen. Small stars were added here by adding Noise and altering the Levels so that only the desirable amount of specks of white were left behind.

Now clouds were added to give a nice texture and a more gas-like appearance. Also, the color of the stars was changed to a colorful spectrum using a gradient.

The lens flare was added to give a nice illuminating effect. Now it really starts to look like a colorful space nebula.

To make the letter Z, I started with new layer. Then I painted in white, using a large brush on 0% hardness. Afterwards, I chopped it down on the side to create a clear line. Next step was to simply duplicate, rotate, and resize as necessary to create the Z. Done!

Final (for some reason the stars don't look the same as in the PSD file...)

I had some trouble with getting this one to look decent, but once I took my time and paid real attention to the instructions it wasn't that bad. I decided to make a 'Z' for my name. It's crazy how people can come up with designs like this. I guess they just might do some random things, see what turns out, and learn from it.

Sphere Update 2

Today I tried to perfect the sphere but it seemed like everything I did only ended up making it worse so I had to restart a few times.. The shadow is starting to look better since it is sharper now but there is still the issue of shaping it correctly. Also, the shading for the sphere still looks a bit off. As of now it still looks fairly flat and dull, unlike the reference which looks 3D, shiny, and smooth.

Sphere Update 1

After a few tweaks to the sphere, I've started in on the shadows. So far they look bad but with some more blending, erasing and shaping they should be good. It's difficult to get things the way you want because I tend to either change things too much or not enough.

Color Blending

 Yellow, Red, Blue blend

Blue, Black, Red blend

Using the brush on very low flow (1-5%) and a little bit of a lowered opacity (60-80%) I was able to blend the colors efficiently. I overlapped the colors and selected the resulting color in the middle to blend and continued with that process.
PS. It looks a lot better than this. The files must have lost some quality when converted to jpeg.

Brushes

Some more experimenting with brushes! I made the stars by modifying the brush to have a high scatter so that I could paint several at once rather than painting each individual one. I also decided to create a planet because I wanted to practice making spheres. I like the look of it and made it smudged to give it a natural look. It reminds me of Mars. I also put in some ambient white light in the background by using a large brush with low opacity to lighten it up a bit.

Sphere

I've just started making this 3D sphere. So far I have the basic shape and general idea of shadow (it helped to use a mask so that I was only able to color within the circle) but there is plenty more work to be done. I still need the ground shadow, ambient shadow, specular highlight, etc, and better blending in general.

Brushes

Here is another experiment with brushes. I upped the size of different brushes to the point where they were square-ish with 90 degree angles. By lowering the opacity I was able to get different shades by simply layering them on top of each other. This created a cool camouflage effect so I went with it. I also made it smudged at the end by using another brush at a large size.