Adding Rain to a Photo in Adobe Photoshop CS3

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All right, welcome to Inside Geek Canada and my name is Logan Thies and I am going to go over a really quick advance tutorial on how to take a photo into Photoshop 03 and how to make it looks like it is raining. Okay. We are not going to waste any time with this. We are going to open with Photoshop. I just on this picture directly right up the internet of Google. So this is actually really detailed pictures of the woods. Now, essentially this will be little bit difficult essentially to make this look darker, how to make it look like it is raining because then we have put in clouds and all that. Well, we can quickly start this altogether very officially. So we are just going to take the layer and we are going to make a duplicate of it. Now this is just my way of how to work things, I usually make two different copies and I always block up the background because I do not want it, because I am always worried that I might end up changing even though it is lock. So I am going to work on this layer.

[Demo]

Now that we have this, we are going to make another copy. Command B, that takes you to the shortcut and that is the shortcut that will take you to current balance. I am not going to too much detail about this but what it does, it takes out colors of what your image has and it saturates the ones that you wanted to. Depending as to whether or not using shadows and the tones of highlights.

For the shadows, we are just going to add a blue to it, for the mid tones, we are just going to quit the change around with this. We have to make it look like it is raining. Usually when it rains, it is not dark, it is not gray, it is usually a blue shade at some sort. So just going to quickly put in a few of this highlights and a little bit of a yellow to it for that, you basically have to play around of this in order it to get it look a little bit accurate. We are going to rate something up between them. All right, a little blue, a little cyan. That is good enough. So I have a copy from the original to the ultra version. I want to make a copy of the ultra version. Pay attention to this very closely, image, we do this actually, pixelate. Now depending how big the raindrops you want them to be, you will have to decide that. First, we are going to use six for now.

All right, now we did that, image adjustment, threshold. Threshold takes out all the colors but it takes the numeral value and it adds so that is a contrasting value. So essentially what we are trying to do here is we are trying to take the light and we are trying to take whatever values that we have on here which are the little white spots and we are trying to determine for where the rain would actually fall. So we are just going to use this, this should be right about here, that should be good. Click “okay,” filter, blur, motion blur. Now of course you have to make it look down, you have to clear out the distance. Okay that should look pretty good, okay now that you did that, then go to up. You have to play with opacity with this. So, it is not looking as great as we would have anticipated but that is okay, we at least got the rain ready. We are just going to go back here, we are going to make another copy of the colored edited one. Command or alt+L, this will allow you to clear out the levels of how much light there is within the picture. Now essentially you have to be a little bit careful because actually you are going to cancel all that.

We are going to darken the sky a little bit to make it look like it is a little bit cloudy, it is going to be a little bit difficult with this contrast. Sometimes, you will actually have to do a little bit unprofessionally by having to keep them burning it until something comes out of it. Actually will have it all this completely burnt parts to this forest too and it is actually this looks better now. Burn it a little bit but do not go over board with picture that looks awful. Now it looks convincing, perfect. We are just going to put back the rain.

So, it is not as great as we would anticipate it but that is okay. The only thing that I can possibly see in this, you see that it is been done in wood, few minutes is the sky. What we are going to do, just as a good habit to get into is depending as to what the photo that you are tampering with, it is usually it is a good idea to blur out sections of worst, some might maybe. This will give the illusion that this on might dynamic you would probably give it a little bit more of the fully feeling into it. Now you do not have to over blur everything, as it is better not to over blur a thing because then it looks awful.

We are just going to click on overview of what we are just going through, so we have the original and it is usually a good idea to make several copies in case the original has to be tampered with. In this case we took one of the copies of the picture and we did a color balance to it. We added color or we saturated it this specifically as we actually wanted within the picture to make it look a little bit more themed. And this one, this required a little bit levels to clear out the lighting factures of them all and then we also burned a little bit here and there and finally with this one, I am just going to move all this I want to show you. But, you cannot see that at all can you? Well, the one that I am blinking right now is the supposed effect of the raindrops.

The rain drop effects as long as various other weather effects that are used or made within Photoshop are very, very difficult to actually get off hand, there use are very difficult to just pull out usually this will require at least a half and hour. If you really wanted to make it look exact, I mean in some cases people could just take a random picture and just make it looks seen. They could make the illusion that is raining and they would look perfectly fine and that would probably take no more if that worst, if that the worst-case scenario between 15 minutes. This took me not that long actually to go around and to add desired effects of what I wanted to make it look like.

However again, this is a talent that does have to be taken into consideration as you have to practice. Photoshop has something that you can pick up and just go. It some cases it can but right now it is something at the practice with and this is not actually the best picture to use either. There is a lot of light in this.

Generally if you want to make something look as if it is raining or if you want to make it look like just for an easier. If you want to have any easier time with this, try and find the darker picture with this. This is probably not the best one that I have found in this example. Well, hopefully you have learned a few new tips and tricks with the new advance Photoshop less than I have given out, thank you for tuning in to Inside Geek Canada. My name is Logan Thies, you can contact me logan@insidegeek.ca, thank you.