Technology in Architecture

By: Stephen Lauer

Post 5: Adding Weather in Photoshop

            Hey so this week’s post will be another tutorial in Photoshop and may not really relate to the image I have been working with up until now but I will proceed anyway. So this week I will show you how to add weather in Photoshop to change the feeling of the image. 

Different weather types that can be added easily in Photoshop are rain and snow are the same process and fog is just as easy in create too. First rain and snow can easily be created by using noise and motion blur. First add a new layer over the top of all the existing layers and paint it completely black with the paint bucket. Next go to the filters drop down and select noise, the settings I use are around 15-30% amount with a Gaussian distribution and make sure the monochromatic box is checked. The higher the amount the heavier it is snowing/raining. Usually less looks better but for the purpose of showing what it looks like I will do more. 

The next step is to apply a motion blur in order to make the rain streaks or snow streaks. The more blur that is added the more it will look like rain and the less looks like snow. The angle of the blur is important because it allows for the rain to have a direction. Once the noise and blur are added go over to the layer adjustments and set the layer with the noise to screen to allow the lower images to show through while having the rain/snow on top. Now keep in mind if you choose to do snow then the ground will need to be adjusted to show snow cover and that can be achieved using the smudge tool and by adjusting the ground to a white color. Now my image above does not really fit the scene to have rain and snow but it gets the point across on how it is supposed to look. The next part of this tutorial is to add fog to the image. First add a new layer and select a slightly blue color (for reference I used C:28 M:13 Y:13 K:0). I may have gone a little too blue on this and should have gone a little grayer but I kind of like how it turned out. Next paint the layer with this color and use the brush as a clear tool to begin to uncover the image. I lowered the opacity of the brush to 25% to begin. I slowly cleared away the layer so that the fog is mostly on the top side of the image and keep the lower of the image clearer. Here is my finished image this week. The fog really helps the set the mood of the image and brings the rain/snow more into context.