The starry Photoshop light filters Getting the highlights of stars’ shapes may be possible if buying special light filters or, simply, they may be represented of different sizes and shapes by yourself, using the Photoshop brushes.

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This lesson you’ll learn how to insert on the picture real looking stars – highlights and create your own brushes sets. You may choose in the Photoshop any placement for the highlights and draw the stars with the quantity of rays on your wish. You may also change the stars’ shapes and sizes.

Firstly we need to create a New Document with a white background, having the size of 250x250 px. Its resolution should coincide with the picture’s one on which we intend to insert the light effects.



Select the Polygon Tool(U). Press on Shapes Layers icon on the options bar and then press on the pointer named Polygon Options, fixing the value of 100 px for the Radius. After that we need to check the Star field and give 92% for the Indent Sides. The upper this parameter’s value is, the sharper the rays are.



Insert in the Sides field the value of 5. This parameter is responsible for the number of the anchor points. Its value depends directly on how many rays a star has. The preparing is done – you may start inserting the stars on the picture.



Set the black color as a working color. We need after that to draw a star on the central part of the picture, just not to get outside of the document’s frame.





Select then the Direct Selection Tool (A) and press on a star’s anchor point, being situated on a separate layer. Now, when getting active the outline, we may make shorter one of the rays by moving its point to the central part of the picture. Another anchor point may be moved aside. Getting an asymmetry is possible if processing each of the rest of the rays the same way described above.



You can create diverses shapes by changing options for Polygon Tool(U) and Direct Selection Tool(A):



Select the next option Blur > Gaussian Blur in the Filter’s menu. The program will ask if rasterizing the layer the star is situated on and in this case it’s necessary to press OK.



Set the Radius on the 2nd value for the Blur option in the dialog box. The best the picture’s resolution is, the higher value may be introduced there.

Select the Define Custom Brush in the menu Edit and give a new name for the new brush.



Activate the Brush Tool (B). Select the last brush from the Brush Preset picker on the options bar. Now the star may be considered ready to use.



Open our picture. I used this image: Dodge Challenger from Flickr.



Try to represent five or six more brushes the same way described above, but this time the sizes, shapes and the number of the stars’ rays may be different. Then thanks to this fact, each highlight can be colored in a cast or another. Set the white color as a working color and make separate clicks on the objects’ specular surfaces for getting the highlights.



The highlight may contain very often the nuance of the specular surface. Our example shows the orange color covering the car and the gilding on the bumper. Choose next the Inner Glow (Layers > Layer Style > Inner Glow) for the Layer Style and give the same parameters demonstrated on the picture.



The color’s standard should be selected out of the zone, close to the highlight. All the stars are represented on separate layers, so we can color them on separately.



If the highlights look too artificially, you may change the level of the Opacity till 70-80%. Select also Free Transform option in the Edit menu for turning over the figure, changing its size, distorting it or even deforming it. Thank to the fact that the stars are situated on different layers, they may be corrected by turn.



Experiment on!