Creating the background image was quite a bit of work, so I’ll split the tutorial up in several parts. I’m gonna start with instructions on the sky. The background started as a 1680×1050 (the typical resolution of a 22″ widescreen display) image with a black background. The sky occupies the upper 4/5 part of the image, so I created a new layer named “Sky gradient” and selected a 1680×840 region. This was filled with a linear three color gradient that goes from black to red to magenta.

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This is way to bright, however, so I set the opacity of the layer to 40%:

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Now we need some stars in the sky. That’s done like this:

  1. Create a new layer named “Stars”, select the top 1680×840 region and fill it with black;
  2. Go to Filters->Noise->Scatter RGB, uncheck “Independent RGB” and set the color values to 1.00 and alpha to 0;
  3. Go to Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur and set both values to 3.0 pixels;
  4. Go to Layer->Colors->Treshold and lower the treshold value until you are satisfied with the density of the star field;
  5. Go to Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur and set both values to 2.0 pixels;
  6. And finally, set the layer mode to “Screen”.

This is what it should look like:

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Now there’s one more thing we need to do. The stars should fade a bit near the horizon, and for that we use a layer mask. Right click on the stars layer in the layer dialog box and select “Add layer mask”, and set it to white. Now we need to apply a white to black gradient to the mask. Make sure the mask is selected in the layer dialog box and apply a white to black gradient on it so the stars fade near the horizon. You have to experiment a bit with this to get the right result. Here’s what it should look like:

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That’s it for the sky. In the next tutorial, I’ll explain how I created the ground.