Getting Started
We start off by selecting our image. We choose a beautiful panoramic image of the New York Skyline. Now in our original photo, there are no stars in the sky.

This is perfect because it gives us room to operate in Photoshop. Some people might approach this process by creating a tiny brush and manually placing the stars into the skyline.

This might not be the best approach for two simple reasons:

1. It would take you a great amount of time to position stars manually in Photoshop.


2. It won’t look realistic, all the stars would look exactly the same.

We knew that we had to approach creating stars with a different mindset if we wanted it to be time efficient and look realistic.

Creating a Custom Brush
We start off with creating a Custom Brush. We bring up a new document and make the Size 500 x 500 pixels. After we have our new document, we focus on the details of our Custom Brush.

Whenever creating a Custom Brush, make sure the Background is white and the Brush Color is black. We paint two tiny dots on opposite ends of our document. This will give the stars more Variation when we actually place them on our image.

Now that we have our Star Brush created we are halfway done. We need to change our Brush Settings in order to get our Star Brush to where we want it. We adjust our Shape Dynamics, Angle Jitter, and even Brush Size until our Star Brush is perfect. Scattering and Transfer also help with the Spacing and visibility of our Star Brush.