Create a Solar Eclipse

Photoshop is the industry standard in image editing today, having proved its versatility over the years. We have for you a series of tutorials done in Photoshop. All the tutorials have been done in version 7.0.1. You may however, use version 6 or even lower. Before beginning, we recommend that you change your Color Settings to that shown
below. 

Press Ctrl+Shift+K to open the Color Settings dialog box and change them as explained below.

First change the Settings option to Custom and make the changes to Working Spaces. These are the settings used by most Photoshop users. Save the settings as PS 7 (we had saved the version 6 settings as PS 6) by clicking the Save button. We also recommend that you press Ctrl+K to open the preferences dialog box and uncheck the Use Shift Key to Switch Tools option. Click OK. Close and restart Photoshop. 

Let’s now see how to create a solar eclipse in Photoshop. A popular effect both on the Web and in print is to create exploding text. We will create a solar corona using this technique here. 

• Create a new RGB document. We created a 800X600 doc at 100 dpi,resolution and a white background. 
• Press F7 to bring up the layers palette if it is not already visible. Create a new layer by clicking the New Layer icon at the bottom of the palette. Press ‘D’ to make foreground colour black. Fill this layer with black by pressing
  Alt+Backspace. 
• Choose the elliptical shape tool (press ‘U’ or ‘Shift+U’ three times). 
•  Make sure the Paths option (2nd icon in options bar) is selected from options bar as shown in figure 1.

• 1 2   3 4  5

  Shift-drag with the tool to cre ate a circle as in figure 2.

• Press ‘B’ to choose Brush tool. Choose a 13 pixel soft brush. Switch to the paths palette (Window>Paths). Right-click
  the Work Path and choose Stroke Path. In the Dialog box, change the tool to Brush as shown in figure 3. 
• Click anywhere in the gray area of the paths palette. Your image should look as in figure 4.
• Choose Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates. Choose Polar to Rectangular option. (see figure 5). The result will not be much pleasing but keep going. 
• Press “Ctrl + I” to invert the image. Now choose Image > Rotate Canvas > 90 Degree CW. Choose Filter>Stylize>Wind. Enter the options as shown and click OK (see figure 6).

• Press Ctrl+F to run the filter again. Press Ctrl+I to invert the image. Press Ctrl+Shift+L to run Autolevels. This will brighten the image. Press Ctrl+F twice to run the Wind filter again twice. The result will be as shown in figure 7.

• Choose Image>Rotate Canvas>90 degree CCW. Now choose Filter>Distort>Polar Co-ordinates. Choose the Rectangular to Polar option (see figure 8)

This will make the eclipsed 

solar disk. Click the Paths tab and Ctrl-click the Work Path. Choose Select>Modify>Expand. Enter a value of 3 and click OK. Make sure that Layer 1 is selected and press “Alt + Backspace” to fill the selection with black. This will cover the white rays inside the solar disk. It will now look as in figure 9.

6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16

• Now, create a new layer. Change its layer mode to Screen from the Layers as in figure 10. 
• Fill this layer with Black by pressing “Alt + Backspace”. If you see nothing happening, you are in the right direction. It is the effect of this peculiar layer mode. Press F8 to display Info palette, if it is not already on the screen. Click the small crosshair on the lower left and change the units to Pixels as shown in figure 11.
• Now to create the Diamond Ring effect. Press ‘M’ to choose the marquee tool. Now, place the crosshair in a position where you want the Sun’s glare to appear. I chose the upper left position. Note the position of X and Y in the Info palette (here 266 and 157). (See figure 12) 
• Choose Filter>Render>Lens Flare. When the dialog box ap pears, Alt-click in the preview box to bring up a dialog box that will allow you to place the flare in a precise position. En ter the values (266 and 157 here) that you noted in the Info palette (see figure 13). Click OK and choose 35mm Prime as Lens Type. Enter a value of 135 for Brightness and click OK.
• This will make the Diamond Ring complete. We can colorize the flare as well as the corona. For this, Pres Ctrl+Shift+U to take away the color from Layer 2. Click on the half black-half white circle in the Layers palette and choose Hue and Saturation (see figure 14).
• Enter the values in figure 15 to give an orange tint to the image.
• The final eclipse will look similar to the picture in figure 16.

To add more realism, click on Layer 1 and choose the Lasso tool. Drag a selection in the lower right corner. Press “Ctrl+Alt+D” to bring up the feather dialog box. Enter a value 3 in the Feather dialog box. Now Press “Ctrl+L” to bring up Levels dialog box. Drag the upper-right slider to left to darken the corona. This is actually what should happen. You can’t see the full corona and the diamond ring together. In this tutorial, a huge dent on the lunar surface happened to be on the way during totality, creating the effect shown above. We can’t blame the moon for that!

Arun Vasudevan