A little something for V-day

Once again it's that time of year when all of us singles are lamenting the fact that we're sat home alone instead of HELPING SIMON PEGG CELEBRATE HIS GORRAM BIRTHDAY! Also something about Valentines, whatever those are.

In keeping with the spirit of this holiday (brought to you by all good gift cards manufacturers), here's a quick Photoshop doodle of something mushy, complete with instructions. Credit to F9Vision.com and NASA APOD for the source images used below.

I started with this easily-Googled picture of a red rose, which I found here:

Using the select colour range tool, I selected the white background, then used "select inverse" to select the rose itself. I found I had to contract the selection by 1px to remove the last bits of white from the edges of the image. I then copied and pasted this selection as a new layer in a new image with a plain black background:

My next step was to make the background more interesting, so I used a picture of the (topical) Rosette Nebula from NASA's APOD site (which you should go check out just as soon as you're done reading this).

Since the nebula image was quite a bit larger than the rose, I was free to let this new layer overlap the edges of the canvas, which let me play with the size and positioning of it a bit more. I used the burn and sharpen tools on the leaves to give them a bit of extra definition.

The next step was to add a glow around the edges of the rose. I copied the rose layer and used the colour overlay option from the layer styles menu to add a pale pink overlay to the image:

To make it look like a proper glow, I duplicated this pink layer and used a Gaussian blur filter with radius 3px on the top layer, and 6px on the bottom.

The next step was to add some stars in front of the rose. I used a plain circular brush with radius 4px and dotted a few stars onto a new layer in the foreground of the image:

The problem with these stars is they don't quite match up with the ones in the background. See those blurry "X"-shaped lines by the background stars? There's a long, boring explanation for why they appear when you look at distant objects through a telescope, but for now all we need to know is how to make our own.

To make things easier I hid every layer except the stars layer and the black background; then I used the magic wand tool to select the space around the stars. Inverting the selection gave me a nice neat selection around every star. I contracted the selection by 1px, and copied and pasted this into another layer, which I called "Stars blur".

I duplicated this layer and applied a motion blur filter with depth 10px and angle 45 degrees to one layer, and depth 10px and angle -45 degrees to the other layer. The result was this:

Bring back all the other layers, and we have our finished image:

And it really is that simple. Happy Valentines everyone!