Learning How to Create Space

In order to create a background (if you can even call it that...) for my digital painting of Princess Leia, I had to learn how to create a star field and how to add a quick, simple nebula. I thought I would share my process on here for anyone who might be curious, and so that I can easily refer back to this when creating space backgrounds again in the future.


 www.photoshopessentials.com/ph…
This was the exact tutorial that I used, but it's a bit lengthy so I'll summarize below.

For this, I used Photoshop Elements 6.0.
1. Create a black canvas and make sure your two active toolbar colors are set to black and white. 
2. Filter > Noise > Add Noise (I used 120.07%)
3. Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur (I used 0.3 pixels)
4. Create adjustment layer > Levels... > Then play around with the arrows and different levels of "noise" reduction until you have the perfect number of stars for your piece. It's gonna be different every time. Might take a little while to get it perfect, but just play around with it.
5. And huzzah! You have stars. And if you want to apply the stars onto a non-black background or on top of a nebula you painted beforehand, just simplify or combine all the layers you just created, then change the layer style to either Overlay or Multiply and pop it on top of your alternate background. Only the stars will show up. 

 And for my nebula, I cheated and played around with "phytoplankton bloom" images on Google. 

Hope this helps someone out a little! It was way easier than I thought it was gonna be, for sure.