Tutorialtime

I have been reading some lovely tutorials!

Perhaps you should too?

NOTES:

The tutorials I used required Photoshop; I do not, technically, own Photoshop. That is okay! I used the GIMP, which is free, and pretty okay! (Mostly.) Of course, GIMP and Photoshop are not identical, so this required some adjustments:

• Whenever the tutorials call for "Linear Dodge", they want the GIMP's Addition. Google told me this, and it seems to work pretty well!
• The lens flare thing didn't really work too well for me. Took a lot of fiddling to get it as decent as you can see it above. YMMV.
• The GIMP does not have a texture-brush feature, as far as I know. (Possibly you could get around this with clever use of the clone tool...?) This means that, for the starfield tutorial, you can't really add stellar dust, and for the planetary tutorial, there are some issues with adding the texture to the planet's surface. I.e., you can't. I ended up doing some fiddling with strange filters to get the results you see above. (Specifically, 'clouds' on a separate layer - which look nothing like clouds - then addition back in, if memory serves.)
• The GIMP also has no Inner or Outer Glow "Layer Style" options. That's because it has no Layer Style options, period. This third-party plug-in seemed to work fairly well in filling that capability gap, though I had some issues with its Inner Glow. Probably PBKAC, though.

Of course, if you have a copy of Photoshop (either through legal channels or some analogue to The Buccaneer's Cove, not to name names, all of this is irrelevant. Which means even more extra fun for you.

Hooray!