What's missing with my background gradient?

[Beegor Bucleor]

I'm trying to build a colourfully rich looking starry sky, and have a pretty good example to work from, but my results are not what I'm aiming for.

This is the example picture I'm working from:

http://www.mikebonnell.com/html/0072/0004_1024.html

And this is the result of my own effort:

http://i25.tinypic.com/2n158ia.jpg

I used the eyedropper tool to mimic my reference's colours, but my background looks flat and dull in comparison. When I zoom in on my reference, it appears as though the gradient is not flatly coloured, but textured. I don't know if it actually is, of if it just appears to be that way to me. If it is, I don't know how to achieve that myself.

Can I get some guidance on how to improve the colour and depth of my picture, and how to get a gradient that is more like the one in my reference? Thanks,

- BB

[Stevie Doodle]

In your ref, the noise of the stars is what breaks up the image.

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q47/StevieDoodle/conceptart/starrynoise_demo.jpg

For your image, one thing that u could try is to make a new layer and set the blending mode to color dodge, then with a soft edged brush lay down some brighter more saturated colors.

That texture you see when u zoom in might be the jpeg compression, but yeah, applying textures can help break up your image also.

[Datameister]

I'd imagine that the "texture" you're seeing is just the transitions between the individual colors. Large, gradual gradients tend to not look terribly smooth, unfortunately, as the computer's approach to displaying colors is quantized. When you've got two colors that are sufficiently similar, the computer can't display a color between, and the results tend to be slightly visible boundaries between colors. The stars will help, as Stevie said...if not for the stars, I suspect the same sorts of artifacts would be visible in your reference.

As for getting more vibrant colors, yeah, blending modes can help. Stevie suggested color dodge, which is indeed very useful, but you can also try overlay and linear dodge for different effects. Also, you've got some stars near the top left that are not white in the center. They're sort of a faded, desaturated purple, which would NEVER happen in real life or photos of real life.

Perhaps most importantly of all...know exactly what you're painting. Are we viewing this from the surface of a planet, or from space? If it's the former, is it Earth or somewhere else, and why is there green and purple in the sky? Asking yourself questions like these and seeking appropriate photographic reference will help enormously. :)

[Beegor Bucleor]

Thanks for all for the information.

Stevie, I like the look of that example with star noise, did you make it yourself?

Datameister, the perspective of the star scene is supposed to be a reality enhanced & beautified (slightly "trippy") star scene... but I was waaay off with my results :nohope: