How to create falling and lying snow in Photoshop!

  Back to Photoshop Tutorials »

We are coming into Christmas times and many will be creating their own snow to decorate websites and more, so what is better than a tutorial on how you can actually create your own snow, right in Photoshop, booth falling snow and lying snow!

Lying Snow
So lets start with the lying snow. It’s far easier than you think it is actually and it is just a couple of steps. Just a note here however, this process of creating lying snow is much easier if you have a Wacom tablet, or any tablet for that matter since you are able to control the brush with greater precision and also pressure sensitivity. So lets get started!

With a document you want to apply the snow to, in my case this header, grab the brush tool (B) and choosing a soft-edge brush at about 5-10px diameter (note, it is important that it is set to 0% hardness) start to paint where you want the snow, making some “bumps” where seen fit to emulate lying snow. That creates the lying snow as seen in the picture at the bottom or top.

Falling Snow
It’s far easier than you think to make some falling snow, but there are some more steps to it than the lying snow but it sure is easy steps.

Step 1
Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) drag out an about 50% smaller box than the area you want the snow to be falling and fill it with solid white.

Step 2
Change the blending mode to Dissolve.

Step 3
Go under Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to apply a Gaussian Blur, and you will see that the white solid shape will start to dissolve as you increase the radius of the blur. Increase as you see fit and click OK. (I like it in the 100-250 range.)

Now you have some falling snow. Note however that if you want to lower the opacity of the snow, you’ll need to group the layer with the falling snow on first and lower the opacity of the group. It is because of how the dissolve blending mode works, You can however mask out places as normal by applying a mask to the layer but all opacity changes when masking will neither be changing the opacity of the white “snowflakes”.

If you change the opacity of the snowflake layer, then you’ll control how “tight” the snowflakes will fall.

After adding some Christmas symbols and shapes this is how it could look:

 Back to Photoshop Tutorials »

    

Please leave a comment or make a trackback from your own site.