How to Transform a Daytime Landscape into a Moonlit, Starry Night

 I'm going to show you how to create a beautiful, moonlit night filled with stars and majestic,celestial clouds from a daytime photo. Open a high-resolution, daytime landscape. I downloaded this one from Dreamstime. com. The first step is to crop you image to specific size. Open your Crop Tool and Crop presets. Click "16:9". In the Width field, type in 1920 "px" for pixels and in the Height field, type in 1080. Go to a corner and when you see a diagonal, double-arrow, press and hold Alt or Option+ Shift as you drag it in or out. Then, press Enter or Return. Since I want to want to see more sky, I'll slide the entire image down by pressing theDown arrow on my keyboard. If you're doing the same for your image, don't be concerned that you're seeing the background on top. We'll be removing it and the rest of the sky next. To accept the cropping, click the check-markat the top. Next, we'll separate the landscape from the sky. Open your Quick Selection Tool. For most resolutions, a radius of 10 to 15 pixels works fine. Drag your tool over the land portion of your image. To remove areas of the selection outside your landscape, press and hold Alt or Option asyou drag over those areas. If you're using version CC 2015. 5, click the "Select and Mask" button or go to Select and"Select and Mask". If you're using an earlier version, click "Refine Edge". I did in-depth tutorials on Refine Edge and Select and Mask, so if you'd like to watchthem, I provided their links in my video's description below. If you're using Select and Mask, make sure the "Refine Edge Brush Tool" is active. I'm using the "Overlay" view mode. Check "Smart Radius", which allows for a variable width refinement area around the edge of your selection. To adjust the size of your Brush,press the right or left bracket key on your keyboard or adjust it here. Drag your tool over the edge of your landscape to refine their edges. Checking"Decontaminate Colors" removes color fringe of the sky bleeding into your landscape. Output it as a "New Layer with Layer Mask". Then, click OK. Make a new layer below the active layer by Ctrl-clicking or Cmd-clicking the New Layer icon. We'll fill the empty layer with black, but first, if your foreground and background colorsaren't black and white respectively, press "D" on your keyboard. Since black is your foreground color, press Alt or Option + Delete. Next, we'll create a star field on the black layer. Go to Filter, Noise and "Add Noise". Make the amount 400%, Gaussian and monochromatic. Go to Filter , Blur and Gaussian Blur. Make the Radius: 0. 3 pixels. Zoom into the noise by pressing the "z" key on your keyboard and dragging a rectangularselection over it approximately this size. Open Levels by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + L.  In the Input Shadow field, type in 240. To fit your document back onto your canvas, press Ctrl or Cmd + 0. Make a new layer and name it "Clouds". Go to Filter, Render and "Clouds".

 

 Change its Blend Mode to "Color Dodge". Next, we'll add luminous, celestial clouds. Make a new layer below the clouds layer by Ctrl-clicking or Cmd-clicking the New Layer icon. Name it "Colors". Open your Brush Tool and Brush Picker. We'll adjust the size it a moment. The Hardness is 0% and make the opacity: 5 or 10%. Click the foreground color and pick a main color for your clouds. I'll pick a rich blue. To adjust the size of your brush, press the left or right bracket key on your keyboard. The size of this brush is size 500 pixels. Brush over the stars. To add another color, click the foreground color and pick a new color. If it's a bright color, you may want to reduce its opacity. Sparsely brush over your stars. Make your Clouds layer active. Zoom out of your image by pressing Ctrl or Cmd and the minus key on your keyboard a few times. Go to Edit, Transform and Perspective. Go to a top corner and drag it out approximately this much. To accept it, click the check-mark at the top. Then, fit your document back on your screen. Make the top layer active and click the Adjustment layer icon. If you're using version CS6 or later, click "Color Lookup". If you're using an earlier version, I'll show you a work-around in a minute. We want to restrict the adjustment layer to effect just the one layer beneath it. To do this, click the "Clipping Mask" icon or press Ctrl + Alt + G on Windowsor Cmd + Option + G on a Mac. Open the “3D LUT” file and click "Moonlight. 3DL". If you're using CS5 or earlier, click the Adjustment layer icon and click "Levels". Clip it and reduce the Output white levels to darken the landscape. We'll give it a blue color cast by making a new adjustment layer and clicking Color Balance. Then, clip it. In the Midtones, give it more blue. Make a new layer and name it "Moon". Open your Elliptical Marquee Tool and press and hold Alt or Option + Shift as you dragout a circle approximately this size. Go to Select, Modify and Feather. Feather it 1 pixel. Temporarily, fill it with any color and deselect it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + D. Double-click the thumbnail of the Moon layer to open the Layer Style window. Click "Color Overlay" and the color box. In the hexadecimal field, type in FFFEDE. Then click OK. Click "Outer Glow". Make the color the same as Color Overlay. The Blend Mode is Normal, the Opacity is 55% and the Technique is Softer. I'll make the Size 100 pixels, however, you may want to adjust this amount depending onyour image's resolution. Make a new layer and name it "Craters". Change its Blend Mode ot Linear Burn. Ctrl-click or Cmd-click the thumbnail of the Moon layer to make a selection of its shape. Click the Layer Mask icon to make a layer mask of the selection next to the Craters layer. Click the chain-link to unlink the layer and the layer mask.  This allows us to resize and/orreposition either of them independently of the other. Click the layer to make it active. Make your foreground & background colors black and white respectively by pressing "D" onyour keyboard or clicking this icon. Go to Filter, Render and Clouds. Notice the moon now has the clouds texture over it. We'll reduce the size of the texture by opening the Transform Tool. In the center of the Transform's bounding box, you'll see this icon, which is calledthe "reference point". Drag it to the center of your moon. Go to a corner and press and hold Alt or Option + Shiftas you drag the bounding box in approximately this much. To reposition the texture over the moon, go inside the bounding box and drag it. Then, press Enter or Return. Reduce the texture's opacity until it looks good to you. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!