 Okay, it is winter and my family, we just took our Christmas photo and although we live in Florida as you can tell by the palm trees in the background, we like to dress up and pretend it's cold for our Christmas photo even though it's like 80 degrees out right now. But what we're going to do today is we're going to take this photo and we're going to add some fake snowflakes to it to make it seem like it's snowing. There are a lot of tutorials out there that show how to do this in both Gimp and Photoshop. The techniques are the same obviously. Well, similar because everyone has their own little fine tuning techniques but I'm going to show you how I do it today. So here we are, we have our image. I'm going to create a new image and I'm going to set the, it to be the foreground color which is black. If you actually make it white or transparent just use your fill bucket to make it black. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go up to filters. I'm going to go to noise, HSV noise and I'm going to leave these first few pretty much where they are, two, three and ten for the hold, the holdness, hue and saturation but the value I'm going to put about halfway you know somewhere in the middle there in the low to mid hundreds. Click okay. Now you may not see it in the video because right now they're very small but we've just created a number of little tiny white dots. Now some people use like, they'll use something like this, a brush to draw that. I like doing this because it seems a little more random. When I draw things with the brush it never seems random either way. What I am going to do now though is I'm going to hit R to bring up the rectangle tool or you can click it over here. I'm going to crop the corner of this or select the corner of this. I'm going to control C, control V to paste and it makes a floating selection here. I'm going to make that a new layer and at this point I'm going to delete the layer we just created. Now I'm going to hit shift T to transform the scale or you can just click the scale button there. I like using shortcut keys when I can. I'm going to drag this out. I don't need it to stay proportionate so I don't have that locked in. You can but I think stretching it out on portion makes them a little more random and snowflakey like. I'm going to click scale at this point and I can also click up here under our mode with that layer selected and click addition. Now we'll get rid of the black and you can see we now have some snowflakes but we're not done yet. I'm going to hit R again for our rectangle tool. I'm going to select again a small selection up here. Control C, control V and make this a new layer. I hope I didn't do that too fast. I don't want to redo it one more time after this. But with that layer selected I'm now going to hit control T. Shift T which is our scaling tool here. You can also click it in toolbar there. I'm going to stretch that one out. Now we have bigger snowflakes here. You can see as I stretch them out they get blurry. Now some people like I said use a paint brush and then they'll blur the different layers. Stretching out like this does the blurring for you. So we can skip that layer. I'm going to once again make that addition. So now we have some little snowflakes in the back near us. Some up closer that are a little blurry because it's like them being out of focus. Like they're closer to the camera. But I'm going to do that one more time. I like to have three layers myself. I'm going to select the corner here, control C, control V. Right click this floating layer and make it a new layer. You can see it just has a few dots in it. I am going to with that selected shift T and drag that out. Click scale. And as you can see it's seven or eight big out of focus dots. So those are going to be flakes that are really close to our camera. We're going to make that an addition layer as well. So we're kind of done here. But I'm going to take it one more step. Once again you're going to tweak this to your liking. Do you want more snowflakes, less snowflakes, bigger snowflakes, smaller snowflakes, want some more layers than what I've done. I find three be a good number for me. But be artistic, be creative. What I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to select this top layer and I am going to merge down. So it merged those two layers, the top two. I'm going to make this layer addition again and then merge that one down. Now at this point I can actually save this image. And instead of doing what we all did I can always just import this image as a layer and add addition to it. I changed the mode to addition to it. And skip those previous steps. Now every picture you would have would have the same snowflakes. Most cases wouldn't be noticeable unless you're going through a slide show in which case you probably notice the snowflakes aren't moving, although you can always adjust it. So that's another option is after creating those three layers, merging them down and saving them as an image you can use as a layer. Now two reasons that I've merged them all into one layer for this particular instance is I personally don't like all the snowflakes over our faces in real life. If it was snowing they would be there, but I find them kind of distracting. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose our erase tool. Again with that layer selected and choose a regular feathered brush. I'm going to scale it up. Not that big. Here's another little hint for you. On your keyboard you have your little square brackets. If you have a QWERTY keyboard they'd be next to the P. If you hold those down, I have the image selected and hold those down, it's slow but it will scale down or up depending on which one you're pressing, your brush so you can kind of see how it's scaling. We're over here you're kind of guessing and coming back, guessing and coming back. But anyway make a brush about the size of the face and then use it to erase the snowflakes on that layer. You can leave some once again be artistic whatever you think looks best. But I like to remove those because I feel like those flakes take away, they're kind of distracting to the face and there we go. So that's one reason and that's how I like it. But if you want to make it look like the snow is actually right here, the flakes are kind of floating around. If you want to make them look like the winds blowing maybe and they're all going in one direction, with that layer selected you can always go to filters blur and use a motion blur. I like to leave it on linear and choose an angle we'll say 45 or 75, 45. And we'll turn this up to, there, we'll say 10 or 15 for the length. If you do it too much your snowflakes will pretty much disappear because they'll blur out but we'll do that. And now it actually looks like the winds blowing and the snowflakes are going because this is a Florida photo to me it now looks like it's raining. So I'm going to undo that but you may want to do that. The other thing that we're not going to go over in this tutorial but some people you could adjust the colors to our bottom, our original image here and give it kind of a bluish tint of some sort, give it a cooling blue and it will give it more of that cold feeling. But we're not going to go over that in this tutorial and plus I'm not very good at doing that but that would be another option. But I hope you did find this tutorial useful. Once again, just creating a noise layer. Again, you can also use a paint brush if you'd rather do that and create three layers at different sizes of stretching them out and blurring them out if you feel you want to go with that route. So it gives you that nice three-dimensional feel to the snowflakes rather than just all the dots be in the same size. So Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. And I hope that you've had a great holiday and Christmas season. And I hope you visit my website filmsbychrist.com. And as always, I hope that you have a great day.