Create a space nebula in Photoshop

Part 1 - Preparation

We will start our tutorial with a simple space background and place the planet somewhere on it. There are 2 tutorials on creating backgrounds for space scenes on The Tip Kit website. Follow one of them and create yourself a nice space background:

Alternatively, for the lazy ones, here's a sample 1280x800 background:

Next thing we need is a custom brush to draw the nebula. Press on the picture below to open the cloud brushes tutorial and, following the instructions, create clouds brush # 3 if you haven't done that yet.

Part 2 - The process

Create a new layer, name it black clouds and start drawing with the previously created brush. Use a black color, obviously, and set the opacity of the brush to 100%. The thing here is to create a rough sketch of the clouds form. Here's what i've got so far:

Now lower the opacity of the brush to 30%-40% and start refining the clouds. Just draw over the edges of the clouds to add some lighter shades of gray. That's what my picture looks like now:

Now create a layer below the black clouds and name it highlights. Pick a 300px airbrush with lower than 20% opacity and set the foreground color to white. The idea here is to highlight some parts of the space to create a contrast between it and the clouds. Just click a few times around the edges of the clouds. This will result in something like the image below:

As you can see, now the black clouds don't look as flat as they were before. I didn't quite like the result, however, so i've changed the foreground color to yellow-ish, selected the highlights layer and pressed the lock transparent pixels button

in the layers panel. Then i colored the highlights by pressing ALT+BACKSPACE. This is an easy way to change the color of complex objects. If you do not lock the transparent pixels, you'll end up filling the entire layer with yellow. By locking pixels you ensure that the yellow color is filled with an appropriate opacity for each pixel. Click on the lock pixels button again to unlock it after you've changed the color of the highlights. Here's how it should look now:

It looks better since the space background i've started with was also some sort of a green-yellow mix. To make things even more interesting, decrease the size of the brush and start painting on the same layer with the same color to increase the highlights even more and adding new ones. If the highlights get too light, decrease the overall opacity of the layer. I've also taken my clouds brush and refined some of the black clouds. Here's my picture so far:

Now add another layer below the highlights layer and name it red clouds. Also add a blue clouds layer below the red ones. You can paint in some blue clouds now or do it later if you like. Grab the clouds brush and paint in some red clouds. Refine the red and yellow clouds to get more detail. Create a new layer above the space background and name it flare. Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare .... For my clouds form, i've decided to add the flare to the top-right corner so i've used these settings:

Now when the flare is rendered and there's some different color clouds, the image starts to look more alive:

The marked place in the bottom-left corner is a part of lens flare, but i wasn't happy with it so i masked it out. If you don't know how to mask a part of a layer out, visit my non destructive deletion with layer masks tutorial or use an eraser to erase it. To make the image look even more dramatic, add some more blue clouds. The result will be a colorful fantasy space nebula scene like the one below.