A nice comet

[photoken]

Here's a method to create a nice looking comet:

comet 01 final.png

1. Create an image using a dark blue background colour.
2. Create a narrow ellipse.
3. Give that ellipse a circular gradient from white to the same dark blue colour used for the background.
4. Using the Edit Vector points tool, pull the midpoint of the gradient far towards the white colour stop and squoosh the gradient:
   comet 01 elipse and gradient.png
5. Use the Distort tool to pull the ellipse into a curved and widening shape:
   comet 01 distortion.png

Continued in next message...

[photoken]

...continued from previous message.

1. Apply a Gaussian Blur adjustment layer to the ellipse. For this image, I used a size of 9.0 and an intensity of 100%.
2. Apply a Roughen adjustment layer to the background to create the stars. I used a size of 1.0, an intensity of 7.0, and a density of 20.
3. Duplicate that Roughen adjustment layer and move that new Roughen layer onto the ellipse layer so that the "stars" will show through the comet. Change the intensity of the comet's Roughen adjustment layer to 50%.
4. Increase the intensity of the ellipse (comet) layer to 124%.

The layers look like this:

comet 01 layers.png

Here's the PLD file:

comet 01.pld

Enjoy!