Hey there! I’m sorry if the title wasn’t more clear, but this was not intended to be an advanced tutorial. I’m sure there are many other ways to create stars that look far more convincing, but the purpose of this tutorial was for simplicity and to show that you don’t need to spend 5 hours in Photoshop to get a good looking product.
As for the final product looking like a bunch of noise, I’m not sure why that would happen. I’ve gone through this tutorial myself many times and always ended up with something that looks like stars. If you either don’t blur the noise enough or blur it too much, the end result will still look like noise. For example, here is one I just made where I did not blur the noise enough and the end result looks like a bunch of white pixels scattered about:
Screenshot
Obviously if you don’t want to use this tutorial, you don’t have to use this tutorial and are free to find one that you think yields a better looking final product. Once again, I am well aware of the simplicity of the tutorial as it was very much intended.