Summary: If the ability to capture a beautiful starry night with your camera seems as out of reach as the stars themselves, no need to worry! Photoshop makes it easy to fill our night skies with as many stars as we like! Now updated for Photoshop CS4 and CS5!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop effects tutorial, we'll learn how to easily add a star-filled sky to a night time photo. I'll be using Photoshop CS5 throughout the tutorial but any recent version of Photoshop will work just fine.

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's usually 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:

Not what you're looking for? Check out our other Photoshop Effects tutorials!

New! Download our Photoshop tutorials as convenient, print-ready PDFs!

Let's get started!

Step 1: Add A New Blank Layer

With our image newly open in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do is add a new blank layer. We can see in the Layers panel that we currently have just one layer, the Background layer, which is the layer that contains the photo:

We need to add a new blank layer above the Background layer. Hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel:

Normally when we click on the New Layer icon, Photoshop simply goes ahead and adds a new blank layer to the document, giving it some generic, meaningless name like "Layer 1", but by adding the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key, we tell Photoshop to first open the New Layer dialog box for us, which gives us an easy way to name the new layer before it's added. Name the new layer "Stars":

Click OK when you're done to close out of the New Layer dialog box. Nothing will seem to have happened in the document window, but a quick look in the Layers panel shows us that a new blank layer named Stars has been added above the Background layer:

Step 2: Fill The New Layer With Black

We need to fill our new layer with black, and we can do that using Photoshop's Fill command. Go up to the Edit menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choose Fill:

This opens the Fill dialog box. Set the Use option at the top of the dialog box to Black, then click OK to close out of the dialog box. Photoshop will fill the new layer with black, temporarily hiding the photo underneath it from view in the document window:

Step 3: Apply The Noise Filter

Let's add some noise to the layer, which will eventually become our stars. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Noise, and then choose Add Noise:

This opens the Add Noise filter's dialog box. The term "noise", in this case, simply means a whole bunch of little white dots. Drag the Amount slider towards the right until the value reads somewhere around 120%, which will add lots of noise to the layer:

Click OK when you're done to close out of the dialog box, and Photoshop adds the noise to the layer: