Creating a Star Field in Photoshop

Start with a new image, any size, a transparent or white background is fine.

(View Screenshot)

Go to Edit > Fill, and choose black as the fill color. Alternatively, you can choose a black foreground and fill in your image with the paint bucket tool.

Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise, and choose something similar to this: 10%, Gaussian, monochromatic. Press Ok. You should see lots of white dots.

Navigate to Image > Adjustments > Threshold, and drag the arrow until you get something you like. I used 70 as an amount; not too much, not too little. After all, the universe IS infinite. Starting to look like a star field? You're not done yet!

The stars on your screen look way too defined and perfect. The perfect way to fix that is to use Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and choose an amount around 0.3 and 0.5. I'm using 0.35.

You could stop right here, or you can touch it up a little bit. A good way to increase the brightness of some stars is to use the brush tool at low opacity and flow, use with white as the foreground color. Touch it up just enough so you have faint auras around clustered areas. The blur and sharpen tools can decrease or increase brightness of stars as needed. Make sure, however, that strength for blur and sharpen is below 75, so you can apply subtle changes.

(View the end result)

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