Create A Starry Sky In Photoshop
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Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to use Photoshop to add a star-filled sky to a nighttime photo.
There's nothing quite as peaceful as being outside at night, looking up a cloudless sky and seeing an endless display of stars sparkling and twinkling above you, stretching far off into the horizon in all directions. It really makes you stop and realize just how tiny we are compared to everything that's out there, far beyond our reach, and even beyond our imagination.
Unfortunately, something else that usually seems beyond our reach is our ability to capture those stars when we take photos at night. Our beautiful starry sky ends up looking more like a whole lot of nothing except darkness, and that's because the light from the stars is usually too dim to be captured by the camera, especially if there are other light sources nearby.
Lucky for us, Photoshop makes it easy to add the stars back into our photos. In fact, in some ways Photoshop makes things even better because we have complete control over just how "starry" our night sky becomes!
Here's the image I'll be starting with:
It's a nice photo showing all the city lights at night, but that sky above the city sure looks empty. Here's what it will look like when we're done:
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Let's get started!
Step 1: Add A New Blank Layer
With our image open in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do is add a new blank layer. We can see in the Layers palette that we currently have only one layer, the Background layer, which contains the photo:
We need to add a new blank layer above the Background layer. To do that, let's do things a bit differently than we've seen in other tutorials. Let's add a new layer using the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+N (Win) / Shift+Command+N (Mac). This will tell Photoshop to pop up the New Layer dialog box where we can name our layer before adding it. We can also set some other options as well, like the layer blend mode and the opacity value, but all we need to do for now is name the layer. This layer is where we're going to create our stars, so let's name the layer "Stars":
Click OK in the top right corner of the dialog box when you're done to exit out of it. If we look again in our Layers palette, we can see that we now have a new blank layer above the Background layer, and that our new layer is named "Stars":
Step 2: Fill The New Layer With Black
We want our stars to appear in a black sky, so let's fill this new layer with black. To do that, first let's make sure our Foreground and Background colors are reset to their defaults by pressing the letter D on the keyboard. This sets the Foreground color to black and the Background color to white, and we can see this in the Foreground and Background color swatches near the bottom of Photoshop's Tools palette. The square in the top left (filled with black) is the Foreground color swatch, and the square in the bottom right (filled with white) is the Background color swatch:
With black now as our Foreground color, use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Backspace (Win) / Option+Delete (Mac) to fill the layer with black. You'll see your image turn completely black, blocking out the original photo, and we can also see in the preview thumbnail for the "Stars" layer that we've filled the layer with black:
Step 3: Apply The "Noise" Filter
With the "Stars" layer still selected (the currently selected layer is highlighted in blue in the Layers palette), go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Noise, and then choose Add Noise. This will bring up Photoshop's "Add Noise" dialog box. The term "noise" in Photoshop really just means "a whole lot of tiny dots", and we're going to add a whole lot of tiny dots to our layer. Inside the "Add Noise" dialog box, increase the Amount of noise by dragging the slider bar towards the right until you've added a lot of noise to the image. There's no specific value to set it to. As you can see in the screenshot below, I've set my Amount to around 111%, but that's just what I've set mine to. The goal is simply to fill the image with lots of noise, so don't be afraid to crank up the Amount value even higher if you want. Anywhere between 100%-140% should be fine. Also, make sure you have the Gaussian option checked, as well as the Monochromatic option at the very bottom:
Click OK in the top right corner of the dialog box when you're done to exit out of it and apply the noise to the layer.
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