Today is the first of many Friday Fotoshop Fun Facts that I am going to start posting weekly. Check back on the blog to see these updates, and don't forget to follow my Facebook Fan Page as well as Twitter: @jlanierphoto.
For today's topic I wanted to show a very simple technique for adding a "rain" look to your image. This is all done in Photoshop CS4. The idea is to take a simple picture that doesn't have any rain and make it look like it does. The image below is a shot I took in Morgantown, West Virginia in October of 2011. Here's how to do it!
1. Open your image in Photoshop...
2. Create a duplicate layer by pressing Command J (Macs) Control J (PC)
3. Click on "Filter", "Render", and then choose, "Fibers"
4. The selection screen for Fibers will pop up. I chose to use 16 as my Variance and 4 as my Strength. Play around with it and choose what works best for your look!
5. This is what your screen will look like, don't panic, it's supposed to look like this...
6. Click on the layer mask button on the bottom of your layers palette as shown in red. This will create a mask for you to wipe away the rain and bring in the background image.
7. Click on "B" to select your brush tool as shown in red.
8. The brush toolbar will then show at the top of your screen. Select a large sized brush as I did here, "900 or higher" so you can wipe away big chunks of the fibers (fake rain). Select an Opacity of about 88% (so it wipes away a lot but still leaves some to be seen). Don't worry about the Flow...
9. Start wiping away the fake rain! This is what it looked like when I wiped away half of the screen.
10. This is what it looked like after I had wiped away all the fake rain at 88% Opacity. So in essence it left 12% of the rain in the image.
11. I then chose to turn my Opacity to 100% and wipe the fibers "fake rain" away completely in select areas of the image. In this image I wiped it all away in the grass areas.
And this is what it looked like when it was done! There are certainly a million ways to do a million things like "fake rain" in an image, but I choose to do tutorials on the most streamlined and already built into Photoshop way to do it. I hope this helps! Please let me know what topics in Photoshop you'd like me to address for topics on upcoming weeks. Thanks and stay tuned!