Step 4: Apply Some Blurring To The Noise

Let's soften our noise up a little bit by applying some blurring to it. This will also help to clump some of the little dots together, creating different sizes and shapes for our snowflakes! The most popular way to blur something in Photoshop is with the Gaussian Blur filter because it's very simple to use and yet still gives us control over the amount of blurring being applied, but for this effect, we can use something even simpler. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and then choose Blur More:

The Blur and Blur More commands have been around since forever in Photoshop and both give us a quick, no-hassle way of blurring an image. Blur offers a subtle amount of blurring, and Blur More offers a slightly stronger amount. Problem is, as you may have noticed when you applied the Blur More command, there's no dialog box associated with them, which means we have no control over the amount of blurring that's applied. Normally, that's a bad thing, and it's a good reason to stick with the Gaussian Blur filter or one of the other more advanced blurring filters in Photoshop. For this effect though, all we needed was a subtle amount of blurring to apply to our noise, so this was a rare case where the Blur More command worked just fine.

Step 5: Reduce The Amount Of Noise With The Levels Command

At this point, our document is filled with lots of noise. Too much noise, in fact. We need to get rid of some of it so our noise looks more like snowflakes and less like, well, noise. For that, we'll use Photoshop's Levels command. Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Adjustments, and then choose Levels:

This brings up the Levels dialog box. In the center of the dialog box is a graph known as a histogram which gives us a visual representation of the tonal, or brightness, range of our image. In other words, it shows us how many pixels in the image, if any, are pure black, how many, if any, are pure white, and where the rest of the pixels fall along the brightness scale between black and white. Directly below the histogram are three little sliders - a black one on the far left, a white one on the far right, and a gray one in the middle. We're going to use these sliders to not only remove much of the noise but also to brighten the noise so that our snowflakes appear white and not some dull gray color.

First, to brighten the noise, click on the white slider below the histogram and drag it to the left until it's just past the point where the right side of the histogram slope begins. You'll see the noise in your image become brighter. Then, to remove much of the noise, click on the black slider and drag it to the right. As you drag the black slider, you'll see large areas of the noise getting progressively darker and eventually disappearing into pure black:

Continue dragging the black slider towards the right until you've removed enough noise so that what remains looks less like noise and more like snow, then click OK to exit out of the Levels dialog box. Your image should now look something like this:

Step 6: Change The Blend Mode Of The Layer To "Screen"

Things are starting to look a bit more wintry, but we do have one small problem. We've created all these nice white specks to use as snowflakes in our photo, but we can't actually see our photo! It's still being blocked from view. We need to hide all the black areas on the layer while keeping the white specks visible. Fortunately, Photoshop makes this incredibly easy thanks to layer blend modes! Blend modes give us all kinds of interesting ways to blend layers together, and one of them in particular will do exactly what we're looking for. With "Layer 1" still selected, go up to the Blend Mode option at the top of the Layers palette. It doesn't actually say "Blend Mode" anywhere, but you'll see a drop-down box that by default is set to "Normal". This is the Blend Mode option. Select the Screen blend mode from the list:

With the blend mode of "Layer 1" set to Screen, any areas on the layer that are pure black will completely disappear from view, revealing our photo on the Background layer behind it, while our white snowflakes will remain visible! If we look at our image in the document window, we can see that sure enough, our photo is now visible behind the snowflakes:

Go to page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4