Galactic design in 10 mins with Photoshop

For the first 10 month of 2008, my website had got a ‘galactic/starry’ graphic style. Now I try to teach you some tricks and tips about this kind of design.

The starry sky

To create the famous sky (I teach you how to make a pattern, so you can use it not once):

Open a new file (200×200px)

Fill it with the black colour

Go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise

Set this values

Go to Image -> Adjustament -> Brightness/Contrast

Now you must increase or decrease the two values many times as you want to get your favourite effect. Mine was this

Now go to Edit -> Define Pattern and then choose a name.

Nice and simple galaxies

Open a new file (900×450)

Go to the Layer Style and select Pattern Overlay

From the menu select the Patter you’ve just created and click ok.
Now select two colors you want (it’s better if you choose black [#000000] for one of these)

Go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds

Now you must warp the layer, so go to Edit -> Transoform -> Warp

Transform the layer as you want, don’t think about its beauty

Now go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Give a value between 20px and 30px

Now you must have a sort of cloud. Now re-wrap it and use a bit of gaussian blur again. Then put the opacity very low (I usually put it between 20% and 35%. If yo need, you can delete some parts of the cloud with the Eraser Tool or with a Mask Layer). Here my first cloud

Now you must only repeat these steps 2/3 times changin’ the colour, the shapes and the position. And here my final clouds