1.
I just know you already read my tutorial, Creating a Planet in Photoshop. Now it's time to create rings so I can have a greater variety of planets in the outer space scene I want to create.



 

2.
I made the planet you see to the left using the techniques in my aforementioned tutorial: made a texture, selected a circular area and applied the Spherize filter.

Next, I need to make the rings. I started out filling an area with a texture I had made into an action and selection a circular area with the elliptical marquee tool (with the Shift key held down.)

If you have 6.0, you can download the action I used here from Team Photoshop. It's called Arctic Water and it's in the bundle of texture actions called teamactions3.atn. If you don't use 6.0, create any texture that give you the look you want using a combination of filters and color adjustments. This one uses Clouds, then Chrome, then Hue/Saturation to give it the blue color. The I applied the image effect action called Steam Bath (which is available in the bundle, teamactions10.atn) To get this foggy effect, the action creates a new layer above the texture. It resets the swatches and runs Filter: Render: Clouds. The Layer Blending Mode gets set to Screen. That's it.

3.
Now I used repeated loadings of the circle selection; Select: Modify: Contract; and Select: Modify: Border (1 pixel), then Delete to create gaps between rings. The image to the left looks as if the rings might if our point of view is directly above the rings. Notice I contracted a bunch and punched a donut hole out of the middle.

Next I Gaussian Blurred the whole image, and used Select: Transform: Perspective (drag the bottom left or right corner handles outward) and Select: Transform: Scale (compress vertically) to get us the perspective you see below:

4.
Since the original blue ice circle was larger than the diameter of the planet, you can see how the ring sizes up next to the planet now that I've made that layer visible again.


 

5.
Now I'm using Select: Transform: Rotate to give the rings the angle I want. Notice the little cross hairs in the center of the transform box. I used this as a reference to get the placement of the rings right. I tried to more or less center the cross hairs within the circular shape of the planet.

6.
There's a lot of ways to get rid of the portion of the rings that would be hidden by the planet. I chose to simply select that area and delete it.

7.
Here's what it looks so far. Pretty cool.

One more thing to do.

8.
I tried to make a portion of the rings have a shadow from the planet falling on it here. Tried, did I say? More like kicked ass!.

No, just kidding. Actually this is the stage of the project where I'm blending realistic light-logic with my own compositional desires. There's another variation to the left below. Without actually observing a similar situation in reality, it's hard for me to determine where the shadow would fall. But I like the results. On an upper layer, I filled that area with a feathered black shape and turned the opacity down low. I think it looks pretty good.

You do, too.

Tutorial Source