Photoshop. Adding falling snow to a landscape.

Here is a fairly easy technique for adding falling snow to a winter landscape.
You will need Photoshop to do this.

First chose a suitable photo.This can be a winter landscape, with or without snow on the ground.  It could also be a cityscape with lots of buildings against a dark sky, or maybe your own house! You need a fairly contrasty photo with plenty of medium and dark tones in it. Anything too pale will not have the contrast to make the falling snow stand out.

This is a building in London.

First create a new layer on your photo. Do this by clicking on the icon at the base of the layers palette or go to Layer-New-layer.

Working on the new layer, go to Edit-Fill and from the drop down menu choose 50% Gray . Ensure that the Preserve Transparency box is not ticked. Click OK  and the image should go grey, and you will no longer be able to see your original image.

To make the snow go to Filter-Noise-Add Noise  and set the amount to between 140 and 200. You will have to adjust this to suit your own photo, and may not get it right first time.  Choose somewhere in the middle, about 170 for your first go!!  Click both the Gaussian and Monochromatic boxes. Then click OK.

The noise effect needs to be softened so go to Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur and enter a radius of between 2 and 4 pixels. Again you will have to play with this a bit to suit your own photo, and create more effective snowflakes.

 Next go to Image-Adjustments-Brightness/Contrast  and set the Brightness to between Minus 20 and Minus 50. Try about 30 to start with. then set the Contrast to a high level about plus 90.
You should now see the effect of snow on a dark background.

At the top of the layers palette it says Normal with an arrow at the side. Click on the arrow to bring up the blending modes. Change this to  Screen and your original image will show through with the snow effect.

This is an example of a light snowfall.

You can play around a bit with the brightness and contrast tools to improve the effect. Whatever you do it is unlikely you will get the best effect on your first attempt. You need to adjust the levels all the way through to get the right snow falling  effect for your individual photo. 

You can also scale down your photo size which will make the snowflakes look bigger.

If you want to give the impression the snow is falling quickly or being blown around, you can continue working on it. Go to Filter- Blur -Motion Blur and choose an Angle by rotating the dial. There is also the option here to change Distance. Try about 15 to 20.  If you put it at 30 it looks like sleet, and at 60 like rain. 

It is a good idea to try variations on this, and practise makes perfect. 

I did another version where I changed the sky, to a more stormy look,  and worked on a smaller sized photo, so the snow effect was more dramatic.   I played with all the variations of amounts and sizes through the filter layers until I got the look I wanted....and it took a few goes!!  This is the result.

Here I  removed the blue sky and put a flat grey winter sky in instead. I made the snow thicker as if it was coming down really heavily.

So this is not difficult to do....but you need a bit of patience and a suitable starter photo. I have tried this on some photos and it has not really worked very well. Sunny days and bright colours do not work well. Moody darkish winter views work best. 

Have a go...it takes awhile to get it just right, but once you have become familiar with the technique, you can very quickly make adjustments to get the look you want.