when planets collide by:Aubrey Morales

First you will get a picture of a nebula. (Because they're a cool background) and make sure the picture is large.

then you will open it in photoshop...

then you will duplicate the nebula layer by right clicking and clicking duplicate layer. (you only need to duplicate in case you need another copy)

then you with get a picture of Earth

then you will get a picture of mars(or any planet of your preference. mars made sense to me)

then you will make a layer for both planets

oh yeah. canvas size. edit it to about here

and you will get this.

stretch the nebula to fit the planet size

anyways. take your picture of earth and press "command-t" for the free transform tool because the picture of earth is too big obviously.

make it reasonably smaller but not too small that it doesnt take up enough space and all you have is nebula and a blue dot. you dont want that.

right about this size should be good.

then you will go to the quick selection tool and select the black around the planet.

right click and press layer via cut. 

do that and it will give you this.

do the same thing for mars. downsize and all.

and put them within colliding distance.

then you will double click on earth and set all of the effects to these numbers and colors.

and you'll do the same for mars

after the effects it should look like this.

next you will take this picture

and cut out the explosion

youll create a new layer and add that picture.

youll get your quick selection tool and do what you did for the planets

youll get the excess in another layer like you did with the planets

go ahead and delete that.

then you will take the explosion piece and place it on earth and mars

you may have to resize your planets to fit the explosion

get your eraser tool and set it to this.

erase all the nonsense so you have just the explosion. 

double click on the explosion layer and give it these effects

ignore the outer glow. you should only have color overlay.

then you will get your quick selection tool and select the explosion and click on brightness. the brightness layer should look like this.

do the same with hue and saturation

then you will get these following images

this one first

put the first one in the corner. erase all of the black for this and set the layer to screen instead of normal(it will say normal right on the layers panel above the layers. change it to screen)

duplicate the layer and do the same thing.

this should be your layers thus far.

then you will take the second of the three images and do the same thing (erase black and screen) and you should have three of them on mars.

then youll take the first of the three images and do the same thing. you may want to use your warp tool to fit the flares better.

you should have two on each side.

giving you a grand total of four.

the flares should look like this.

last minute change to your nebula.

wah-lah!