How to Create a Starry Night Photo Manipulation With Photoshop and Filter Forge

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh is easily one of the most recognizable pieces in art history.

And I'll show you how to make it in this tutorial! Build the famous composition from scratch, using free stocks, Photoshop, and amazing filters from Filter Forge.

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used in the production of this tutorial.

How to Download Filter Forge

To use Filter Forge, you'll need to download it first. After you run the installation, it'll automatically update in Photoshop CC under the Filter menu.

To launch the program and peek around, go to Filter > Filter Forge > Filter Forge 7.

Browse their massive collection of over 12,000 filters for smart photo effects, 3D textures and more. Search their selection online or use the Download More Filters option within the program to get started.

Here are all the filters you'll need for this tutorial:

1. How to Create the Starry Night Scene

The first step is always the research. And it's pretty crucial in this scenario. We're challenging ourselves to emulate a very famous painting, so we want to pay homage and our respects by paying close attention to details.

Here's a little backstory on the Starry Night from my Art History article on Impressionism:

Art History
Art History: Impressionism
Melody Nieves

Vincent painted The Starry Night as a patient at the Saint Rémy de Provence asylum in southern France. Like many of his works, it features cypress trees and a small town under a glowing night sky.

With this in mind, here are a few notes to remember:

Oddly enough, none of the scenery in The Starry Night matches the actual location. It's not a plein air painting, but one from imagination.
However, you can find stocks that still match the original layout. Look for items like cypress trees, old historical towns, and general landscape photography.
Also, Impressionism is a very loose style of painting, so the filters we're using should match that too.

Let's begin!

Step 1

To build the Starry Night scene, we'll need these images:

Create a New Document in Photoshop at 1250 x 950pixels. Then Copy and Paste this Field reference onto its own layer.

If you have trouble with perspective, references like this can help you learn how to ground the landscape and figure out the layout. For the most part, we'll be placing images on top of this field, so it's just a placeholder for now.

Step 2

To show you exactly what I mean, let's add the main focal points—the trees and sky. Extract the tree from the Cypress image using the Magnetic Lasso Tool (L).

Delete the white background layer.

Then Copy and Paste the tree onto its own layer above the field. Control-J to Duplicate the layer twice. Use the Free Transform Tool (Control-T) to resize the other two trees to match the painting.

Step 3

Now that we have the trees ready, we need to change their shape to look more fluid, like the Impressionist style. We'll do this by using the Liquify Tool.

Bring the first tree into Liquify. Select the Tree layer and go to Filter > Liquify.

Use the Forward Warp Tool (W) to push the branches and leaves inward. Create curvy, S-like shapes like the ones Vincent loved. And make the base of the trees more round.

Do this for all three trees. Keep checking back with the original Starry Night to see which shapes work best. Here is my result.

Step 4

The next part of this puzzle is the sky.

Both the sky and trees make up the biggest pieces to this puzzle. And this Sky and Mountains stock is pretty awesome because the high mountain shapes on the right side look just like the painting.

So let's add it in, shall we?

Copy and Paste the sky and mountain reference onto its own New Layer above the field. Use the Move Tool (M) to position the image higher on the canvas, allowing the mountains to hit their mark in Van Gogh's scene.

Next, add a Layer Mask to the sky and mountains layer. Now we must reshape the mountain image. Select the Brush Tool (B) and use a Hard Round Brush to paint black onto the mask. Mask out the areas seen below.

This step should help guide your eyes to understand where things intersect within the painting. One image alone will help create the perfect background elements!

If you're picky about the details, let's adjust this mountain before we move on. Go to Filter > Liquify and push the mountain higher using the Forward Warp Tool (W).

Step 5

Now for a little surgery!

To create a sky more like the painting, we have to redistribute the clouds we see.

Use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to create a large selection on the left side in order to cut out that section. Hold Control-J after your selection to Paste it onto a New Layer.
Flip the sky piece. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal.
Place it above the right mountains. Use a Layer Mask to diffuse the edges with a Soft Round Brush.

Now repeat these steps to add more clouds to the scene. Select the clouds first, and then Flip and Mask them. Use a Soft Round Brush to help blend the clouds into the mountains and sky.

Here is the result.

Step 6

Time for some more trees!

Copy and Paste this Landscape stock onto a New Layer above the clouds. Add a Layer Mask to mask out the sky. Then use a Soft Round Brush to feather out the trees near the top of the landscape.

Here is the result. The extra benefit of this stock is that it'll help fill in the gaps of our painting.

Before we move on, let's fix the color. Add a New Adjustment Layer of Curves and set it as a Clipping Mask to the landscape layer. Adjust the curves for the RGB, Blue, and Red Channels to make the landscape more blue.

Step 7

Repeat these steps with the Old Town image.

This image will represent the middle ground area. This is where the town in the painting should be.

Paste, Mask, and then recolor, remember? Copy and Paste the image, or just an extraction onto a New Layer. Add a quick Layer Mask to clean up the edges around the buildings. Then add a New Adjustment Layer of Curves, this time lowering the RGB Channel for more contrast.

Feel free to use bits and pieces from the other stocks to fill in parts of the scene.

Before we move on, add a New Adjustment Layer of Color Lookup. We'll use this to finish the photo composite portion of this Starry Night effect.

Set the 3D LUT File to FoggyNight.3DL and lower the Opacity to 60%.

Here is the result.