Space Art #1 - Texture for Planets

1. Google Earth has very nice photos that we can use as texture for our planets. You can also use textures from many other sites, check out my list: Free Photos Database.

2. I'll explain how to use Google Earth as our base for textures. Install and start program.

3. When you start a program you should see our planet:

4. Go to options, Tools -> Options.

5. I use these settings, best quality of images:

Click to enlarge

6. Disable sidebar, Ctrl+Alt+B.

7. Disable compass and disable navigation, Show Navigation - > Never.

8. Click and drag, use your mouse wheel to zoom in until you see something like this:

It's very small image but I hope you understand what I mean. You should get clean texture without dots, border lines, names. Be sure that you have Streaming to 100% (It's download indicator).

9. Ok, what now? Press F11 to go to Full View Mode. Move your mouse out of screen and press Print Screen button on your keyboard.

10. Open Adobe Photoshop, make a new document, size should represents your screen resolution, click Ok and Ctrl+V or Edit -> Paste to paste our first image!

11. Use Crop Tool to delete unnecessary parts of the image.

12. Crop like in the picture below:

Click to enlarge

13. Save cropped image as Texture-001.jpg or whatever you like.

14. Repeat steps 8-13 with other parts of the World ;) Try to get 10-15 different textures. You can paste other screens on your cropped image, move a little and save instead of making a new file. It saves a lot of time.

15. Of course you can use other images as textures. Wood, brick etc. Look at a list from step 1.

16. Ok, we have some textures. Make a new file, 3000x3000px. Large, but we won't lose any details while resizing.

17. Paste all textures on to our new file. Move them as in the picture below:

18. Select your upper layer, hold Shift and click on a layer in the bottom to select all of them.

19. Press Ctrl+E to merge them together.

20. Now we'll try to blend them. We'll do this using Clone Tool.

21. You should spend some time to get a nice effect. Select Clone Stamp Tool, Soft Brush, maybe ~150px. Hold Alt and click somewhere here:

22. Release Alt button, and start brushing here to reduce sharp borders:

23. Sometimes you should repeat step 21 and choose other areas, without sharp borders.

24. Repeat steps 21,22 in a whole picture until you have something like this:

Click to enlarge

25. You can add more details. Add more textures and play with theirs blending modes. Spend some time to improve it ;)