What you can see below is the real photo of a nebula. Looks amazing, isn’t it? Well, some may say it doesn’t, but that’s not the point. Creating such an image in Photoshop from scratch is easier than you may think, and this is exactly what we’ll learn today…

As usual, there’s enough left for you to experiment in this tutorial, and if you want to add a star field to the image, that’s something I’ll keep for a future article. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so we won’t recreate the Universe in Photoshop in just a single tutorial, right?

1. Create a new document having black background. The size is up to you, you can choose your monitor’s resolution as size, for example, and create a wallpaper, but I will use the settings below…

2. Select a soft brush as you can see below. I use a size of 100, but if you have a larger image, you should pick a larger brush too, of course.

3. Brush a shape using blue, something like the one you can see below.

4. Add some red using a smaller brush(65, in my case).

5. Now, grab some yellow and throw it into the document…

6. At last, use a smaller brush to add some white spots.

7. Apply Gaussian Blur with a setting of 30-35, or even more, depending on the image size.

8. Press Ctrl+L to bring up the Levels dialog and use the settings below to enhance the lights and shadows in your image.

9. Create a new layer, fill it with black and apply Difference Clouds to it.

10. Now, duplicate this new layer.

11. A good idea would be to use the Smart Sharpen filter on this layer, and add some light effects, or at least one “star”, as you can see in my last shot below.