Dear Mr. Hannicart...

Bralt,

Those are looking awesome btw, but you could increase the effect if you'd spherize by 150%. Just a tip :-)

Eclipse

I do my work with pure Photoshop. There are some great examples and tutorials on the net.

Again, recall that sphereizing by 150% is better.

examples:
http://inventor.deviantart.com/art/Planet-Tutorial-7928535
http://alpha-leader.deviantart.com/art/Urban-Planet-Tutorial-34797137
http://ucd.deviantart.com/art/Land-Planet-Tutorial-4586548
http://mr-frenzy.deviantart.com/art/Planet-Texture-Tutorial-22346538

just search for planet on deviantart.com and you should find some great stuff. The one I wanted to post I couldn't find in any reasonable time frame, but there are some great ones out there.

Eclipse

On of the best people at it is Greg Martin. He used to have a fantastic tutorial on his website but it appears to be gone. However he's still got some fantastic stuff so you should check that out too.

http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com

Eclipse

I used the Greg Martin tutorial indeed. Easy and effective indeed. But I no longer make those spacescapes, they were made only for the purpose of SWAG :) I don't remember all the steps. It had to do with making a real nice texture for the planetary surface, make some fake bump mapping with two duplicate layers (one screen and one multiply) of the same texture layer but with a filter and adjusted levels. Then spherize the entire circle and some outer and inner glow effects. etc...

Sorry for the really late reply...

I remember when we first saw that tutorial. Everyone was making planets like crazy! It's all some people did for months! lol