Hi, I’m Glyn Dewis.
Welcome to episode sixty-five.
This week I’ve got a really cool technique for you, showing how you can take a regular
picture and turn it into a winter snow scene.
All right, so this technique couldn't be any simpler.
It’s also incredibly quick to do but putting those two points aside, it really is effective
and realistic when you use it on the right picture.
There’s a couple of point’s I’ll mention right at the very end of the video to help
you make sure that you do choose the right picture, and also a couple of things that
will help you get exactly the look you’re after.
That aside, let’s just dive in now and show you how we can turn the picture you can see
on the screen now into a snow scene very, very quickly.
What we’re going to do, we’ve got the picture open in Photoshop.
I’m then going to go to “select menu” and choose color range.
Now when this comes up we get this little preview box here, this properties within the
color range.
Lots of options we can use to choose from but I’m going to leave it set to sampled
colors.
In this area here we’ve got the world’s smallest preview box here.
This basically shows us what we’re selecting within our picture.
The way we select something is just bring our cursor out, and when we bring it over
the image it changes into a color sampler.
All I’m going to do now is just start clicking around the picture in different areas until
I get the kind of selection that I want.
This is a thing that you need to just practice.
Don’t expect to just open any old picture, click once, and get exactly the look you’re
after.
What I’ve found with this picture was want I want to do is just click around to a certain
point where I find that the majority of the selection is on the ground, exactly like you
can see now.
Very rarely is it you can see small amounts on the trees.
They’re pretty dark there, but you can see that the floor now is covered in white, and
that's basically what you’re going to notice with this preview here.
Anywhere that turns white is what is going to form part of your selection.
The black areas aren’t being selected.
The great thing is now that I’ve got the floor selected I can then come to the fuzziness
slider.
I tend to think of it as range.
The more you increase it to the right it starts to bring in more ranges of colors that it’s
going to add to that selection.
You’ll notice … I know it’s small, but as I bring it to the right you’ll start
to notice that more of the pictures goes white which means more is being selected.
The actual trees now have started to get a little bit of the selection on it.
It’s not pure white.
It’s a grayish color.
That means we’re going to get a very light dusting of snow so that's going to work really,
really well.
I make my selection, making sure that the floor is the main part that's being selected
and is white.
Then I play around with the fuzziness slider, and in this case I’m going to drag it right
over to the right hand side and then click “okay.”
Now, when we click “okay” Photoshop seems to go crazy and the whole picture is covered
with marching ant selections.
Now what we do is we go to the layers panel.
We add a new blank layer at the top of the layer stack, so it’s now above our picture.
I’m going to rename that to “snow” and then I want to go to the edit menu, choose
“fill,” and from where it says “contents” we have the drop-down menu.
I’m just going to choose white and then click “okay.”Then we go to “select”
and “deselect,” wherever that is.
Deselect, right at the top.
There you go, very quickly, just with a couple of clicks we’ve already created a snow scene
and that is pretty realistic.
What I really love about it as well, like I mentioned before when we use that fuzziness
slider, it’s how we’ve now even brought in a very light dusting of snow onto the trees.
You can see all the detail, all the texture, a little bit of the original tree showing
through.
It’s really just like dusted across the trees just like it would in real life.
I absolutely love that.
Now one thing you can also do is, because some of the selection areas, certainly on
the floor, might be a little bit hard in some areas, what I find works is once I’ve actually
got the actual snow on the ground I then got to filter, blur, Gaussian Blur, and just add
in a very small amount, one pixel radius of blur, and click “okay.”
You’re pretty much done then, but if you want even more snow on the ground what you
can do is just duplicate that layer by holding down your command or control key and pressing
J. You can see then even more snow.
Now, that's this tutorial.
You could take it a step further by adding falling snow into it.
Here’s one that I prepared earlier with falling snow.
The way you can create that is if you go over to my YouTube channel, when you go to the
main page you can click on the little link here that says “weekly show and podcast,”
and here’s where you will see a list of all the episodes within this weekly show that
we’ve got.
Scrolling all the way down you’ll get to episode thirty, which is this one just here,
and it’s called “How to create realistic falling snow.”
Again, just like most things in Photoshop, it’s an incredibly simple technique, but
I think you’ll probably agree, very, very effective.
Now before we close just a few points to remember when you’re doing this.
Let’s go back to the original picture and turn off the actual snow on the ground.
Now when you look at this you’ll notice that you can just see the sky coming through
the trees.
That is one of the important things, is what does the sky look like?
You can’t take a regular picture with loads of clouds and sun in and all that kind of
stuff and expect this to look real.
You need to have a sky that has got no detail in it.
The sky here is pure white and that's pretty much what it’s like when it’s snowing
outside, so look for those kind of pictures.
Also you’ll notice the lighting in the picture here is very flat, pretty featureless [kind
of lighting here.
There’s no shadows and that's exactly the kind of lighting you would need and you would
see when it’s actually snowing in real life.
The other thing to think about … or sorry, to remember when you do this is when we first
come in and we use the “select” and “color range” don’t expect that the first time
you try it, when you click down, you’re going to get the perfect result.
This took me quite a few attempts to know exactly where or the area to click within
this picture to work.
If you click in the wrong area the result is pretty naff, to be honest with you.
It doesn't look good.
If you get it right where the snows is on the ground and everything else is dark, and
then just use that fuzziness slider to just add a little bit of a dusting in other area,
you’re going to absolutely nail it and it’s going to look really realistic, just as I
hope you agree with the final result here.
That's it.
That's all I’ve got for you this week.
I told you it was a quick one.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, and please just let
other people know about it.
I really appreciate the support there just by spreading the word, and just let other
people come to the channel, and just check out all the tutorials that I’m recording
every single week and pushing out there.
Well, hey, that's all for this week.
I’ll see you next time.