DIY Sunstar Overlays for your Landscape Photos (with Files!)

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In this video I'm showing you a way to create your own custom sunstar overlays which you can use to enhance your landscape images.

Sunstars occur when a bright light source is in your image and you're shooting with an aperture of around F/16-F/22 and in my opinion it can be added as a cool element to landscape photos. Sadly you can't always perfectly align the sun with the landscape in order to add such a sunstar to your composition. With this in mind I decided to create my very own custom sunstar overlays which I can later add to any shot using Photoshop blending modes. Here's a recap of what I used and how I've captured the overlays:

1. To create the sunstars I used different lenses (11 up to around 30 mm focal length), a piece of thin wood and two tripods, on one I pleced my DSLR on the other one I placed the piece of wood.

2. First I removed any filters from the lenses I was using since those filters would cause refractions which I want to reduce to a minimum for this effect. Then I used a microfiber cloth to carefully clean the lenses to get a really clean looking sunstar later.

3. Now to create a cool sunstar effect we want the sun to shine through a small opening, the smaller the better (you can just take a picture of the sun in the sky but this will lead to a huge 'sunstar-blob' in my experience and this wouldn't be useable). Here I encountered some problems since I first tried this by cutting small holes in a black t-shirt, the shirt was moving in the wind and I couldn't get the sun and the hole aligned to capture the effect.

So instead I grabbed a thing piece of wood and drilled a small hole in it. I also made sure that there wasn't any dust or particles left inside the hole to get a clean tunnel. To really get a good effect later I suggest to paint the surface of the wood facing the camera later black (Makes the editing of the overlays easier later).

4. Then I placed the piece of wood on my tripod and my DSLR on the other tripod and tried to align everything so the sun was shining through the hole in the wood right into the center of the frame of my camera (if done right you can already see the sunstar effect on your display, DON'T LOOK THROUGH THE VIEWFINDER!!). Of yourse here I had to reposition my camera a lot until I got the right point.

5. Now I started taking images, always with an aperture between F/16 and F/22! I tried to make sure that everything but the sun(star) is black, so I used a very short shutterspeed (something like 1/250 sec). I also used different lenses which result in different looking sunstars. By the way the best ones came out after using wider angle lenses, also I wouldn't suggest to point your camera with a tele lens attached right into the sun since this can kill the sensor.

6. Once you have your images there's still some editing needed. Since we are adding the overlays by using blending modes in Photoshop later, we want everything but the sunstar to be black. In this case I just added contrast, reduced blacks and sometimes also exposure. You can add some texture to make the stars look sharper and also kind of increasing the length of 'star lines'. By adding temperature you can also make the sunstar warmer or colder of course.

7. Now if you want to add this overlay to one of your images, just place it above the picture in Photoshop and change the blending mode from normal to screen!

Conclusion: For me it was a pretty cool thing to do on a otherwise boring day, but as I am writing this right now I noticed there's a much, much easier way to do this. Simply place the piece of wood on a flashlight, use an overhead tripod (sorry don't know the name of those 90° degrees tripods :/ ) and you get those stars without worrying about any movement...

If you want to use my overlays feel free to download them here: