supernova

This is my first critique, so don't take anything too seriously <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/let…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Lick)"/>

When I first saw this image I couldn't help but think that it was so close to being excellent, there's so many beautiful details and the overall composition looks great.

What I'm really being picky with here is the colour of the nebula, it all seems a bit washed out and stale but I think a tad of colour balance in the red and yellow direction could remedy this.

As for the starfield, the big ones look a bit hard with no glow, I recommend place a layer under your large stars layer on lighten and fill it in a reddy orange colour with a bit of white (something around ff6e51) and set the opacity to around 5-15%.
Then on your big stars layer set the blend mode to normal, so you can see what you're doing, desaturate it and then set set the brightness/conrast to make them all white, now duplicate that layer, set them both to colour dodge and blur the bottom big star layer to your taste.

<img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/w/w…" width="25" height="17" alt="" title="Phew!"/>

Now, the planets, I don't really have anything to say about these, they're well made, nicely detailed and realistically lit, all I can say is that one in the top corner would be nice for compositional purposes, but not necessary.

The ships are a nice addition and fit in well with the piece.

All in all this is a very nice, well made piece of space art, it doesn't exactly stand out from the crowd but still has it's own unique feel, I'm look forward to more <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Big Grin)"/>

sorry this kind of turned into a tutorial, I kind of got carried away <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/s/s…" width="101" height="20" alt="" title="Time to haul ass out of here!"/>