Hi everyone and welcome to my first column here at Planet Photoshop.
I'm going to be writing a weekly article right here. Many of you already know me from the forum (ColinS) and others from PhotoshopCAFE.com.

I am going to help you explore the universe called Photoshop and I can't help but have a little fun along the journey. So to kick off our time together we are going to create a lightspeed starfield in 3 steps. In the famous words of the captain… Engage!

Press the "D" key to reset the foreground and background colors.
Press "X" to set the background to black.

Start with a new document and choose background color (black). Any size will work, but I chose 200 X 200pixels and RGB color space.

Now go Edit>Fill or the shortcut Shift Delete. The fill menu will pop up.
For contents choose white. Change the mode to dissolve and the opacity to 5%
Press OK

Now I bet that's been the easiest you ever created a starfield!

Lets go to warp speed now. Filter>Blur>Radial blur
Set it to zoom and the amount to 10.

We basically have our effect now. Just like the observation deck of the Enterprise. Ok… Well almost J

Just for a little effect add a lens flare. Filter>render>lensflare. Use the default setting and just move it to the left and up a bit, hit ok and there we have it.

Just a little teaser for you this week. I hope you learned something and had fun.