1.
Check out this sun-like image I created in Photoshop. Manfred Mann explained why we can't look directly at the sun, but the view I was trying to create was like some I'd seen where we actually see details and the sun looks orange-yellow. I didn't know what this view was called so I did some research and here's what I learned.

A spectroheliogram is a photograph the surface of the sun in a single wavelength of light, usually one corresponding to a chief element contained in the sun, e.g., hydrogen.



 

2.
Okay, spectroheliogram it is.

Anyway, I started out with a 7" x 7", 200 ppi file (the size and resolution you choose will , of course, depend upon your needs). Next, I filled the area with the bubble pattern you see to the left. It comes with the Patterns in Photoshop 6.0.

To the left you see a magnified shot showing the detail after I chose Image: Adjust: Hue/Saturation. I checked the colorize button there, and played with the hue, saturation, & lightness sliders until I had the "orange-ish" color I wanted.

3.
Next I scaled the whole area down.

Below left, you can see my black background showing through after I chose Edit: Transform: Scale and shrunk everything (while holding down the shift key) into the upper left of the canvas.

4.
Time for a filter to get the three-dimensional effect.

Choose Filter: Distort: Spherize, and you'll see something like what I did to the left (the amount was 100%).


 

5.
Here I took the elliptical marquee and dragged a circle (hold Shift while dragging) around the area you saw in the last image. After that, I chose Select: Inverse and hit the Delete key.

6.
That looked nice but in order to create a rougher, blurrier edge, I duplicated the layer, enlarged it slightly and chose Select: Modify: Border. I specified a width, in pixels, for my border (this will depend on the resolution & size of your file). I feathered the selection by a few pixels and selected the inverse area. After deleting the inverse area, this is what I saw (with the original layer hidden).

7.
After making the original layer visible again, this is what my home-made sun looks like. Pretty decent.

8.
In an alternate method for creating the rough border, I used this brush
(it's one of the Natural Brushes you can load) with the eraser tool to erase portions of the edge. Here's a portion of the area I worked on.

9.
Here's part of that alternate "sun" I created. My goal here was to make the "bubbles" within the surface smaller. They are but when I did this one, I noticed the bubble pattern is NOT seamless and you see a nasty repeated effect which I thought looked too fake. If I was to do this job professionally, I'd either fix the pattern to look more random and tile seamlessly, or make my own.

Catch some rays!

Tutorial Source