Affinity Photo: Amazing Stars - Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends today I'm gonna show you how to get amazing stars onto any night sky my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer from Vienna Austria and I want to thank all my patrons for supporting me and making these videos possible let's get started so one of my students wrote me that he took a picture from night sky was a bit boring he visibly like really amazing stars and I'm gonna show you how to make that happen so I downloaded another picture as you can see here with really cool stars on them they are a little bit too high in contrast so we will fix that in the process I can show you how to do that too and make it a little bit more dreamy from the atmosphere so the first thing that we want to do is go back here and use our selection brush and by the way I selected a picture where we have a very easy horizon it's just a line if you want to see how to work with a more complex horizon I will link a video that I have created about sky replacement where you can see how to do it with the forest and stuff like that that's sky replacement for the day but the same technique for the night so let's select everything here with our selection brush there we go come on select everything snapping to our horizon very nice so I will click on refine and then on apply because here we don't have to do much more very simple technique in this case and we want to click on the mask layer and this is gonna create a mask for us command D on your keyboard to deselect the selection we have done and then we pull out the mass because we don't want to have it on our picture with the boring sky we want to have it on our picture with the amazing sky and one trick I want to show you here is don't pull it directly onto the other picture because then when you resizes the mask is also resizing instead what you want to do is select the layer and press ctrl key on your keyboard and this will create a group and then you pull in the mouse above the layer that you want to use there we go and you can see it's there we have a little bit of mountains from the other picture but now I can simply zoom out a little bit and grab my other layer here not the group but the picture layer and just resize it and there we go the mountains are gone oh maybe we don't have to resize it that much there we go the mountains are gone the sky is in the perfect place we are ready to go now we do some adjustments because you can see that the mountains in the foreground don't fit the ambient light of the picture so that's really important to take into account so what we're gonna do for that is two things first thing is I will set this to a blend mode so it blends with our original picture in this case I will set it to hard light and then I will duplicate this layer and I will rasterize it because this layer is in house it's image mode but we need it in pixel mode so let's rasterize that real quick and then I'm gonna set this to filter blur and average and this will make an average of all the colors in the picture you can see here when I go to normal everything now is just one color and this is the mix of all the colors in the sky picture so now we can blend this with our picture so let's go here and see we're gonna go with soft light and I will pull this down below our sky layer because the sky layer of course already has the color and you can see now that the mountains have the ambient light from all of the skies this is more fitting another thing I want to do here because the sky is lighter in the middle and darker to the sides is I want to create a layer a pixel layer so click here at pixel layer and then use a brush we want to set it pretty big you can see here pretty thick big diameter hardness - zero opacity 30% and we want to set the color to black and now I can just brush on here a little bit so we make the sides of the mountains a little bit darker because of course it's nighttime so it's okay if they are dark so there we go but we already also changed the lightness of the sky and we don't want to have that so what we're gonna do is we're gonna right click and duplicate our mask and then pull it down onto the layer that we just created I will call this shadow shadow it's not really shadow but it's like darkness and then click again on the mask and go up here to layer and invert so it's only affecting the mountains not the sky I can see here this looks a lot better because it fits what we would expect the flow of the light to be okay so now we have to do another thing and that is fix this kind of to high contrast sky picture it's not kind of atmospheric enough for our taste so what we're gonna do is again go to the sky layer and duplicate it there we go and rasterize it where it is there there we go okay and now what we gonna do is we go to effects Gaussian blur select preserve alpha that's important so the sites are not getting transparent and then just blur it you can see you get a really nice look and you can blur it really strong you can blur it just a little bit so this is really up to your taste and up to how much of the details you want to preserve or I have highlights they see if I if I blur it a little bit this details here they still have a very strong light but when I blurred a little bit more these details lose a little bit in their light and contrast and everything gets a little bit softer and another thing that I want to suggest to you in this case is go to a hard light oh sorry go to the blend mode which is hard light at the moment and play around with the different blend modes because you can see here you can get really interesting really amazing effects and if something is too bright like for example he is scream that's too bright but what you can do is you just reduce your pass 'ti to an amount where you feel like okay this is the look that I want to have so there's a lot of freedom and artistic playfulness in here so you can try out whatever you want in this case I want to go with 100% and heart light because I feel like this dark and intense look with the strong glow in the middle is kind of perfect for this situation I really like it okay so that was the tutorial on how to get a nice star filled night sky with the dreamy lights and a nice ambient light on the mountain where we have the sides a little bit darker thank you very much for watching suggest topics in the comments if you want you and maybe subscribe to my channel I do two tutorials per week see you in the next video bye