Tutorial written by Elfdaughter

OK, this is just the way I do planet rings. I’ll assume you’ve followed my last tut on how to create the planet, and still have that PSD open.

Create a new document, a little smaller than you want the rings to be.

Fill the background layer with black. On a new layer, make sure your foreground and background coours are set to default, then run the clouds filter.

Then go to Filter – Distort – Twirl.

Set twirl to maximum.

Repeat that filter a couple of times.

You should now have a spiral shape with a few bits of cloudy areas around the outside, like this:

Now take a large soft eraser. and get rid of the cloudy areas around the outside, and part of the middle of the spiral, so you’re left with the amount of rings that you want. Now use Free Transform to squash the layer so the rings look like rings and not a spiral. You should now have something similar to this:

As you can see, I’ve pushed and pulled it around using distort and scale. The next step is to make sure it is completely desaturated by pressing ctrl+u and pulling the saturation slider right down to the bottom. Then go to Filter – Noise – Add Noise. Now, before we go any further, I’ll explain why the noise filter is important. Planet rings are not smooth, as I’ve seen a lot of people think. They aren’t made from gas, but from bits of rock and other space debris that are kept in orbit around a planet due to the force of that planet’s gravitational pull. So when we create planet rings in PS, we need to be aware that these rings are not going to be smooth.

So in the noise dialogue box, make sure ‘gaussian’ is selected, and set a noise amount of about 8-10. Now go to levels, and bring the middle slider up so the values read: 0, 0.35, 255 (You can either change the levels before copying and pasting, or afterwards. If you do it before, remember to change the blending mode of the layer to screen once it’s been pasted in.)

Then copy and paste your rings onto the image of the planet you created in the previous tutorial. Scale the rings to fit, erase the unwanted areas, and perhaps do some fine-tuning of colours using the hue and saturation panel, or the variations panel.

So here is the final image:

Finally – be creative, and have fun. And remember that space is gigantic, and we, as humans, have only just started to explore the tiniest part of it. The rules and physics that govern our tiny galaxy are only just beginning to be understood, and who is to say that the same rules (while they will help you achieve more believable images) will apply in other galaxies, in other universes? And also remember that sometimes, even the far-fetched ideas can be based in fact. Why NOT have a planet with 13 moons…Neptune has…and Jupiter has a massive 63! (At last count, anyway…)

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