Photoshop Tutorial

Recreating Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night Painting

Start off by finding your reference image of Starry Night and open it on Photoshop. Then search for similar colored photos (dark blue, light/dark green, etc) to compile together to create the first part of the sky background.

After getting your photos into separate layers, you can start off by designating parts of the art to make sections easier to work with. Start adjusting the hue and saturation of each color backgrounds to match the original reference photo, this will help with any stray areas not covered and placement. Then in each layer you can erase and blend them togther to create seamless background. You can do this by taking the opacity and lowering it to 50%.

Start with the first color of your background, in this case would be blue. With the background a low opacity you can see the original photo for reference. By creating brush strokes of variety of colors (which you can obtain by using the eyedropper tool) and sizes you can replicate the movement of the sky and winds.

It becomes pretty time consuming to make each individual stroke so a way to fill up the layer would be to use the clone tool to help you out.

Repeat this process with the rest of the backgrounds. Be sure to use different layers when working with the ground, stars, wind, to avoid messing with already finished sections.

For the buildings on the ground area level, you can start off with using the rectangle and pen tool for guidance. Fill the buildings with corresponding colors and use the brush tool to make subtle but significant fills ins and strokes to finish the buildings off.

Use the quick selection to select the tree like object from the original photo and move it into the masked layer placed all the way into the top.

Combine all of the layers together and make anymore last finishing touches to any of the layers using the brush tool.

Use the adjustment layer tools to change the brightness and contrast of any selection of layers to create the work as your own. By doing this it brings more originality as well as create emphasis.

Finally, you are left with your final product of the Starry Night photoshop recreation.