Another beautiful background for a space scene

In a previous tutorial we've created a basic background for a space scene with stars and gas clouds. Today we're going to create something more colorful and dramatic. In today's tutorial i'm going to show you how to create space with stars and space dust. The result will be have more drama and contrast than the previous neutral background. So whatever space scene you create, you'll now be able to chose from neutral and dramatic backgrounds. Let's start.

Preparation

We will be needing a clouds brush # 3 from the tutorial below so click on a link and create it if you haven't done that yet.

Part 1 - The starry sky

I'm working on a 1280x800 image so you can create a new document with the same resolution as well. Fill the background with black and name the layer stars. Now go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise .... Use these settings:

That doesn't look like stars, does it ?:) Let's fix it. To fix this mess, we need to hide some of the stars and leave the rest intact. That can be achieved by increasing white and black points of the image (adding more contrast). Press CTRL+L to open levels filter. Now play with the left and right sliders until you get something decent like this:

Duplicate the stars layer by pressing CTRL+J. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. With the new layer selected, open levels again. This time leave even less stars:

Now press CTRL+T to activate transformation. On the top of Photoshop window there's a tool settings panel. Lock the aspect ratio and resize the stars to about 200% as shown below:

You will notice that our stars have become blurry and that's not really good.

Blurry stars

To fix this problem with the blur, let's use the good old levels again. Open up levels dialog and once again play with the left and right sliders until the stars start looking more like this:

They're still a little blurry, but that's already acceptible. Now we need to downsize our big stars. Press CTRL+T again and, using the same procedure as above, downsize the layer to a little larger size than the layer below:

Change the top layer's blending mode to screen to make the layer below also visible. Now take the clouds brush # 3 that you've created in the beginning, change its size to about 200px, opacity to ~20% or even less and color to black. Draw on both of the layers to make some of the stars disappear. This is a creative process: where and how to draw depends completely on you. You should end up with some places with higher star concentrations than others. Here's how my image looks so far:

Finally, select the top layer and press CTRL+E to merge it down with the first stars layer. Next, take the clone tool

from the tools palette. What we want to do here is clone some of the stars and put them in some areas to make even higher concentrations with stars. To do that, select a soft 300px airbrush for the clone tool and, on the top of the Photoshop's window, set the settings as shown below:

Now the clone tool works as follows: you select a part of the image to clone from by pressing ALT on your keyboard and left-clicking once with your mouse. Then place the mouse over an area you want to transfer the cloned information to and start drawing. As you draw, the source area will move as well and you will be cloning information from one area to another. Generally, it would not increase the concentration of the stars, because the layer is not transparent, but if you set the clone tool's mode to screen as you shown in the settings picture above, the black cloned areas will become transparent. So by cloning in a screen mode we are only cloning the lighter areas of the image and the dark areas remain uncloned. In this case that means we're copying the stars from one place to another and the black background is not being cloned, thus enabling us to create high concentrations of stars. This is also a creative process, you will need to work on the cloning for a while before you reach something decent. Remember: there's usually no pattern in nature so don't try to draw something - look at it as a random process. Also vary the brush size during the process if you want. Here's how my image looks after the cloning procedure:

As you can see, you don't need to emphasize all the areas of the image, but you should experiment and end up with something that works best for you. Now duplicate the layer with CTRL+J and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur .... Set it to ~3px blur and press OK. Set the new layer's blending mode to linear dodge. This adds a sort of glow to the highest concentration areas and enables us to change the color. Press CTRL+U to open up the hue / saturation dialog. Play with hue and saturation sliders until you get a color that you like. In my case, i've used 209 for hue and 91 for saturation to get this color:

You can now select the top layer and press CTRL+E to merge it with the background layer. Time to add more color. Pick the clouds brush # 3 again, push the opacity down to less than 10% and pick some color. It should be similar to the one your stars are colored in. I've used a 5% opaque brush with this color:

Now, varying the brush size, draw in some clouds. The outcome of this process is also dependent completely on your taste and oppinion. Here's what i've come up with:

OK time to draw some big shiny stars. We will do them on a new layer so go ahead and create one. At first take a soft airbrush and set its opacity to ~50%. Use a white foreground color. To draw a star, change the brush size to something small and click once. Then increase the brush size a little and click again. Keep doing that until you get a star of desired size. But how do you always click on the same place if you need to go to the top of Photoshop's window to change the brush size? That's easy. In case you didn't know, you can change the brush size with [ and ] keys on your keyboard. So the process is like that: start with a very small brush, click, press ] a couple of times, click again, press ] a couple of times etc. Use this process to create some stars like these:

So far the stars look too ... round. Let's make them a little more interesting. Take the smudge tool

from the tools palette and choose this brush preset:

Set the strength to ~30%-40% and smudge the stars. This will add a little distortion and the stars won't look so perfectly round. Don't expect them to change dramatically though: this is just a very little tweak. You can now merge down the top stars layer with the background. Now we will have to play with burn

and dodge

tools. These tools increase or decrease the intensity of colors. The dodge tool is used to increase the intensity (make the colors brighter) and the burn tool does the opposite. We will use these tools to tweak some parts of the image: make some areas darker and some areas lighter. Start with any of these tools, pick the same brush you used with the smudge and set the exposure value to about 5%. You can find this setting in the tool settings panel, located in the top of Photoshop's window. On the same panel there's also a combobox named range. You will need to change its value depending on the situation. For example if the range is set to highlights then the tool will only affect the lightest colors. So if you want to increase or decrease the intensity of the stars, take the appropriate tool and set its range to highlights. If you want to change the intensity of the darkest areas, change the range to shadows. Everything else falls into the midtones category. So play with these tools to get something interesting. You can increase the exposure value of these tools to make the effect more intense. But i'd recommend to leave it at 5% and just be patient with the process. I've increased the intensity of the star fields and darkened some already dark areas in the picture. I've also brightened some blue clouds. Here's what i've come up with:

I wasn't completely happy with the result so i created a new layer and added some more clouds with the cloud brush # 3. Finally, i've applied a soft focus effect as described in the dream effect quick tip. Final image: