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› › HOW TOof the Layers panel.
Now all future stars will
at least stay contained
to the sky area as long
as those layers don’t
escape the Stars group.Step Five: Okay, it’s
time to make some
noise! Create a new
layer, and drag it into the
Stars group. Pick up the
Paint Bucket tool (nested
below the Gradient tool
[G] in the Toolbar), c lick
on the Foreground color
swatch in the Toolbar,
select a medium-value
color (such as a blue)
in the Color Picker, and
c lick OK. Now c lick on
the image to spill this
color on the new layer.Step Three: Change the saturation of the blue with a
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (first icon in the second
row of the Adjustments panel) placed above the Curves
adjustment layer. This will allow you to fine-tune your
color and saturation. In this example, a Saturation of –30
will do the trick in getting things a bit more natural. You
can always add coloring effects and intensity in the global
edits at the end. For now, get things looking like an un-
edited night shot from your camera: fairly flat with loads
of potential. If you start off too stylized, it doesn’t give you
much to work with in the final adjustments.ADD STARS
Whether you have an empty night sky you already shot,
or you applied the above effect to a daytime image with
a plain sky, here’s how you can make some stars from
scratch, or in this case, from noise!Step Four: There are many ways to make sure your stars
stay in the sky and not cover the entire image so, for this
example, we’ll assume you have a good grasp of separat-
ing out your sky with selections tools and Select and Mask.
If you need a refresher on separating landscapes
and skies, take a gander at my class on Creating Landscape
Composites, as it’s an addicting subject in itself.
A simple method for now is to c lick on your image layer
in the Layers panel to make it active, and then select the
sky with the Quick Selection tool (nested below the Object
Selection tool [W] in the Toolbar). Click Select and Mask
in the Options Bar to refine the selection, and make sure
the Output To drop-down menu in the Properties panel is
set to Selection before clicking OK.
Click the Create a New Group folder icon at the bottom
of the Layers panel, move the layer group to the top of
the layer stack, and rename it “Stars.” Turn the sky selec-
tion into a mask for the Stars group folder by c licking
the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottomGo to Filter>Noise>Add Noise to add noise to this
layer; an Amount of 300% will give you a good amount
of noise variation with which to work. Starting with a mid-
value color allows you a little bit of nuance to work with,
as well, which will translate to star density in the next step.
Set the Distribution to Uniform, turn on Monochromatic,
and c lick OK.