Making galaxies shiny with Photoshop
I was using a Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 1309, a perfectly-formed spiral galaxy, as a background image. But it was a square image, and it had a watermark, and I didn't like the colors. So I found a higher-quality image that didn't have a watermark, and set to work.
Transformation: I made a new canvas of the right dimensions (1280 x 800 for my widescreen laptop), and copied the full-size image in. I converted it into a smart object (so I could keep playing with various sizes/rotations without losing quality from multiple transformations in a row). I decided on a position/size/rotation for the galaxy.
Reconstruction: This resulted in there being some blank space, so I had to reconstruct it by copying from another part of the image and messing around with the colors. I got rid of the more obvious duplicates of the smaller galaxies and stars using the clone tool.
Filter-ation: I sharpened the image twice, then applied a smart blur (this leaves some of the more prominent details, while smoothing out some of the less-contrasting parts). I faded the smart blur so it didn't completely remove the texture. Then I adjusted the curves and the color balance to my ultimate satisfaction (darkened the image considerably, added blue and cyan to the midtones, added a bit of magenta to the midtones, and added yellow and red to the highlights). Then I saved it.
(Eric complained that there wasn't a 1280 x 1024 version, so I made one. It's higher quality than the others.)
