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Quick and easy way to add snowflakes to your design

Christmas is coming! And if you design something for yourself or your company to celebrate it, you probably need to add realistic snow in the background of your design, and you do not want to spend hours drawing it. If so, you might find this tutorial useful - I discovered this technique while playing with Photoshop filters, and it produces good results very quickly. | Views: 31942 so far

Start with black document, 3-4 times bigger than desired final size. Fill with background color you need (blue for example). Create new layer, fill with grey color (#808080). Go to Filters menu - Pixelate - Pointilize. Set size you want, keeping in mind that image will be scaled down (you can experiment, for me 16-20 px was OK). Desaturate (Ctrl-Shift-U), then set Auto Levels (Ctrl-Shift-L). Now we need to replace black with transparent. Use the following sequence: - select all (Ctrl-A) - copy (Ctrl-C) - turn on quick mask (Q) - paste (Ctrl-V) - turn off quick mask (Q) - invert selection (Ctrl-Shift-I) - delete (Del). You should get something like shown here. Now make the following: - right-click on layer thumbnail image (in Layers palette). Menu will open; choose Select Pixels. - invert selection (Ctrl-Shift-I) - delete (Del). Repeat previous step 2 or 3 times, until the image starts to look like falling snow indeed. Finally, scale down the file to 50-30% of its size. You can also set layer Blend mode to Screen, to avoid darker snowflakes. That's all!