"Space Sig 3" by Joe

Created for a photoshopforums.com contest. That gibberish on the left is a custom font I made.

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

You made that font? Wow.

Where did you get that picture in your sig? (a little off topic )

Yup, that font was designed by moi in a free trial version of a font creator program. I think the program was called Font Creator. I designed the alphabet before that, as part of a conlang (constructed language) project.

I made it from scratch, all in Photoshop. No photos or renders involved. (Okay, I used a picture of a man with his hands behind his back for painting reference. But the photo was never in my computer.) This is "Space Sig 2"; I thought I'd use it rather than post it in the gallery.

Amazing. You made the stars and everything?

Yes. I have my own technique for creating starfields.

Time for a star field Tutorial... Please

Perhaps you are right...perhaps it is time to divulge my secrets to the world...

that sounds realy cool i wouls like to know how to do that.

All right, all right. By popular demand, here is the basis of my starfeild technique.

1. Create the starfield like Greg Martin does. Don't follow his tutorial too rigidly; you want this to be unique. But that will give you the start of your starfield. Don't do all the clone-stamping and erasing yet.

2. Press ctrl-A to select the whole canvas. Copy the contents and paste them onto a new alpha channel. Ctrl-click the channel's thumbnail; you should see marching-ants selections form around the brighter stars. Now go Select>Modify>Expand. Set the value to 1px and hit OK. Press D, then alt-backspace, then ctrl-D. You should see rather large whitish blotches instead of stars. Now go Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set a value of about 3.3px. That value will vary, depending on the look you want.

3. Create a new black layer just above or below the other star layer, and set its blending mode to Linear Dodge or Screen. (Make sure you create a layer, not a channel.) Go back to the Channels palette and ctrl-click your star channel. Go back to the new layer. Press D, then X, then alt-backspace. Your stars should take on a glowy quality.

4. Use Levels, Hue and Saturation, and a black brush to get the look you want. I often set my stars to a faintly blue color, dim the glow layer a little, and use the black brush to darken some stars. At this point, you can do all the erasing and rubber-stamping in Greg Martin's tutorial.

So what's the trick? All the alpha channel business achieves a simple goal: it adds a faint glow to each star. That's all.

That Cross seems to be your personal signature. It's shown up in a lot of your work. It's simple, but cool.

sorry guys. I don't mean to totally take over the forum by responding to every single topic but...

I can't seem to find greg martin's method. his work on his website, though, is quite impressive.