764 High-resolution snowflakes in Photoshop

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now today we're going to visit the topic of creating synthetic snow entirely from scratch inside Photoshop. Now we first took a look at snow back in Deke's Techniques 482, adding snow to your holiday design, which came out at the end of 2015. But that image only measured 1,500 pixels wide by 1,000 pixels tall. This image here, is twice as wide by twice as tall, so it contains four times as many pixels. And so it's time to put away the children's tools, and bring out the big gun shootin' huge flakes inside Photoshop.

Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, let's see how to create synthetic snow that's ideally suited to a high-resolution image, here inside Photoshop. Now, I want the snow to appear in front of not only the background, but the model as well. So if you're working along with me, make sure that the fur layer is selected. And then, you want to create a new layer by pressing ctrl + shift + n, or cmd + shft + n on the Mac, and I'll call this layer snow and press the enter key or the return key.

Alright now tap the d key to ensure that we have the default foreground color black, as I'm seeing down here at the bottom of the toolbox, and then fill the entire layer with black by pressing alt + backspace, or opt + delete on the Mac. Now there's all kinds of snow techniques out there, but the one thing they share in common is that they result in very tiny flakes. We want to anticipate that problem by reducing the size of this layer so that we can then turn around and increase its size so we end up with big juicy flakes.

And to make that happen, go up to the edit menu and choose free transform, or you have that keyboard shortcut of ctrl + t here on the PC, or cmd + t on the Mac. Now in the most recent version of Photoshop CC, free transform is set to scale proportionally by default, meaning that we have a link icon between the width and the height values. If the link isn't selected for you go ahead and click on it, and then select either the width or the height value and change it to 25% and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac a couple of times to invoke that change.

Now at this point it's a little confusing to have the model in the background. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off both the fur and blend layers, and then I'll generate the base snowflakes by going into the filter menu, choosing pixelate, and then choosing mezzotint. And you've got a bunch of types to choose from right here. You can go with long lines for example, or you could go with long strokes. We want dots, and we want the biggest dots we can get. Now grainy dots work pretty well, except they're a little too closely packed together.

Whereas coarse dots are still large but they're farther apart. At which point I'll click okay to accept that change. Alright now we want to increase the size of our flakes, and the best way to do that is to first convert this layer to a smart object. That way we'll be scaling the flakes dynamically, and you can do that with the rectangular marquee tool selected, by right-clicking any old place inside the image window and choosing convert to smart object. Now return to the edit menu and once again choose free transform, and this time, with the width and height values linked together, I'm going to change either one of them to 500% like so.

And now we're going to get some big snowflakes. Now when I say snowflakes, I do so in quote fingers, because if we zoom on in here, you can see that so far they look nothing whatsoever like snow. In fact, they look like what they are which is big rounded pixels. What we want to do is gum things up, and the best filter for smoothing out clumpy snowflakes is this guy up here in the filter menu, under the noise sub-menu, and it's medium. So go ahead and choose that command, and then enter a radius value that smooths things off, without making the snowflakes too tenuous.

And so at about seven pixels where this image is concerned, things work out nicely, at which point I'll click okay. Now we want to lend our snowflakes some motion so that they appear to be falling from the sky and the simplest way to do that is to go up to the filter menu, choose blur, and choose motion blur. And I came up with a distance value of 40 pixels as we're seeing right here, and an angle value of 120 degrees, although both of those values are entirely up to you.

At which point I will once again click okay. Alright now notice this empty filter mask right here. We don't need it, so I'll right-click in that white thumbnail and choose delete filter mask, and that'll just help cut down on some of the clutter here inside the layers panel. And then, because I want to drop out the black pixels and keep the white ones, I'll go ahead and switch to the screen blend mode. And notice if you will how blend modes now preview on-the-fly inside the most recent version of Photoshop CC. Alright, so I'll go ahead and choose green, and then I'll bring back the model bu turning on the fur and blend layers.

And now we have big huge chunks of snow that appear both in front of the model and the background giving us a fully integrated scene. Alright now we've got an awful lot of snow but it's now enough, which is why if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a follow-up moving in which we add still more snow by duplicating our smart snow so far, adjusting a few filter settings, and masking away at the model's face. If you're looking forward to next week we're going to create this Bokeh effect in which it looks like we have snow that has landed and melted on the lens.

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