Not bad you know :) It's actually good but I've got a few things to point out... First there are no clouds in space... clouds are only in the lower parts of eath's atmosphere... Second... Illumination of a planet is not consistent... The area between highlighted and shaded parts of the globe is pretty sharp... Third... about the glow... well look at a sun or a strong reflector and you will see what I mean :)

There actually are clouds in space. Clouds of dust, or hydrogen. Look at nebulas, which are giant clouds of gas. The clouds in this image, is dust gathered around the planet.

And yes, I know the illumination isn't consistent. It's both due to my crap shading skills, plus the planet itself having dark spots due to the green/blue seas it has, which makes proper shading even harder.

And finally, the glow I just fumbled about with until I came with a result that may not be realistic, but at least looked 'pretty'.

Thanks for the great comment! It helps a lot. :3

Chuckles :) it's a planet not nebula :) Nebula gas is very sparse and it's visible on radiotelescopes only because it radiates but I'm not quite sure in wchich spectrum... To see a nebula you need to look at a scale much greated than a single planet :) That's why I said there are no clouds in space :) hehehe... at least not such like in the picture...

Well dust gathering around the planet doesn't make much of physical sense but I understand it's an artistic vision... Actually most of sci-fi movies are artistic vision and space scenes are made to be nice for watchers, not to be totally correct :)

Hmm... Try practising in a bit smaller scale... huge pictures are not very ram-friendly and working on them takes longer... When I was learning myself how to shade things I usually started with basic forms... it's good to draw simple spheres, cubes and stuff and try to shade them properly. This way you can learn very much... Next you can try putting a light source just behind the sphere and try to draw a nice glow... (by putting behind I mean: to imagine that you put that behind XD)...

With 8GB of DDR3 Black Dragon RAM, that's really no problem. Photoshop could handle this piece quite easily.

This image was never meant to be an accurate, realistic depiction of a planet being hit by a meteor, so I really don't care about the flaws in realism it may have. It looks fairly pretty, and serves as a decent background for my pc - for now.

Maybe it's not much of a problem but still :) Usually there is no need to draw such high resolution pictures... :)

PS: DPI and resolution in pixels are not related... so if you specify the resolution, then say what is the size in real units - not pixels... Because when you say that your picture is 1920x1280, at 8000 DPI that means after printing it will be less than 1 square inch xD From the other hand you can print the same picture in different resolutions getting prints of different sizes... lower resolution = worse quality but larger print...

I just peeked through your gallery. Great work! :3

Thanks ;)

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ho fck! thanks!! XD. lol