Creating a Planet Texture

[Ascension]

Anyone who knows me knows what I'm about to say First, because of the small size of the landmasses double the size of the image. Second, put your landmasses on their own layer...lots of ways to do that so I won't take up space here by describing them all. New layer, filter - render - clouds. Duplicate this layer then do render - difference clouds 2 times. New layer, fill with black, decrease opacity to around 75%. New layer, ctrl-click your landmass layer then select - modify - expand - however much you want to expand by, select - feather - same as the amount you expanded by, fill with white, reduce opacity to around 25%, then click on the black layer and hit the delete key, then deselect. New layer then hit ctrl+alt+shift+E then filter - render - lighting effects (make sure that your light covers the whole image and also use a texture channel and click on "white is high" and move the slider to "mountains". The mountains might be out of place but you can delete this layer and go back to the clouds, black, or white layer and manually airbrush in some white or black to put the mountains where you want them. Here's an example. In my example I crop the land layer to fit the selection of the landmasses and put a black layer underneath (ocean coverup) then used an expanded and feathered selection (both 100) of the landmasses to delete holes in it.