Vorlock

Jake2K, on your amazing.pdn, layer "inner shadow", which basically makes the large metal structure look curved...how did you do that? Sorry for the newb question.

Rick, that WAS with the exploding planet tutorial (as i mentioned in my 2nd line of text). Rainshadow, that looks much better, thanks. Still, my picture seems a lot more blury and less well defined than my target. Any idea how to fix that? The exploding planet tutorial (which is what I used as the basis for my attempt) uses lots of blurs, so not sure how to get that effect while still generating the picture with that method.

I am trying to make this: But the best I have been able to come up with, using the exploding planet guide plus me screwing around, is this: I am a complete newb, and just recently downloaded Paint.Net. As you can see, I am pretty close on the granuality, though not exactly there. My spiky flames are not as spiky/clearly defined either. But the worst part is the color. I have no idea how to get a scaling of color from white to yellow to dark red. Plus, my image looks a lot more blurry than my target. I am sure some of it is from the conversion to jpg from native Paint.Net, but the rest of it is probably from my clumsy attempts at using the sharpen, zoom blur, and other random tools trying to get it to look the way I want it to look. Can anyone help with this? If you can, please use small words and assume I am an idiot when it comes to Paint.net. Thanks in advance.

Fixed the links in my post above. Can someone help me now that they can see what I am talking about?

I am trying to make this: But the best I have been able to come up with, using this guide plus me screwing around, is this: I am a complete newb, and just recently downloaded Paint.Net. As you can see, I am pretty close on the granuality, though not exactly there. My spiky flames are not as spiky/clearly defined either. But the worst part is the color. I have no idea how to get a scaling of color from white to yellow to dark red. Plus, my image looks a lot more blurry than my target. I am sure some of it is from the conversion to jpg from native Paint.Net, but the rest of it is probably from my clumsy attempts at using the sharpen, zoom blur, and other random tools trying to get it to look the way I want it to look. Can anyone help with this? If you can, please use small words and assume I am an idiot when it comes to Paint.net. Thanks in advance. P.S. This is my first post here. I am not sure this this goes under requests forum or this forum. I picked this since the tutorial is already here, but if this is inapropriate please say so and I will post in requests instead. Edit: Fixed links to some other free image hosting service.