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November 22, 2000

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Well, here is my first space creation, "Nebularia". The first of a series of
interstellar graphics images I planned to create. I highly recommend that you
see the larger, high resolution versions of this image.
    I created this image completely by myself. No paintings or Hubble images
at all.

    How I did it...
The first part was a picture I took a while back in the dark. I
accidentally forgot and left the flash off on my digital camera so all I got
was a dark image. While adjusting the contrast and brightness to try to
bring an inkling of the original image out all I got was a bunch of colorful
noise. I lowered the color saturation and realized that the image looked
exactly like a bunch of stars. That became my background.
    The clouds are from a sunset I took a few months ago. I actually sent
the image on Atmospherical Friday on 10/6/2000. I flipped the image over,
adjusted the contrast, brightness and color saturation and paste it over my
stars, adjusting the opacity to bring out the transparency a bit.
    Adding the lens flare effects for the three stars was way too easy.

    While playing with what I had decided to be the finished image, I accidentally came
up with the large gas planet. I was playing with a lens flare effect parameters and laid it over
the same cloud background and a few clicks later I had a beautiful gas
planet, using the texture from the original clouds. (This came to be a very useful tool for many of my planets for later images.) I paste the gas planet over the stars and decided that it needed something else. Perhaps some kind of small moon. That's when I came up with the water moon.
    I tried the same lens flare trick over an actual image of some green
water and changed it to blue.

reference links: 001006.htm