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Snow? S'no problem! 7 replies

meowza

Staff meowza posted 1 year ago

Here's another really quick and easy tutorial.
This time, how to cover a house in snow.



To make my job easier, I first found sources of snowy images that might fit into my original photo.
Using a picture of a snow covered roof, I started by taking the Lasso Tool and selecting the edge of the roof.
I copied this selection onto a new layer.
Using the Distort tool, I aligned this segment it to fit like so.


Then, I did the same with the plane of the roof,


using a hard Eraser, I went on to clean the edges of the snow on the sgements we pasted, removing all obstructing background elements.


And again, for the surrounding areas and background, it was simply a matter of taking apart segments of snow from our source pics and cutting and pasting them to fit around our house.
Most of this process is just trial and error, finding areas of your source pics that'd suit your original the best.
I used the Lasso tool to cut these areas out, distort tool to align them, and a soft eraser to blend the edges.
meowza

Staff meowza posted 1 year ago

After we compiled the general composition of the image, I wanted to enhance the mood of snow a little more.
So I took the Paint bucket tool and filled the entire thing in a blue tone on a new layer.
I then set this layer's blend mode option to "Overlay" and dropped the alpha to 60%.
this gave our entire image a nice blue tint.


Now to add falling snow into our image.
The easiest way I found to do this was to find a nice clean picture of falling snow. Preferrably one with a fairly solid background.
I pasted this source onto a new layer, then simply set the layer's nlend mode to "Screen".
This allows only the brighter tones of the layer to show through, leaving us only with the snow flakes exposed.


Finally, I copied this layer several times and pasted it throughout our image to cover the entire picture in snow, using the Move tool to offset a few of these segments to help randomize the snow's position.


And that's it.
A really simple way to an easy snow job.
Questions? Please ask. Have your own methods? Please share!
Layered .egg
Marslyr

Marslyr posted 1 year ago

Wow, thanks for sharing!

Quick Question:

With the first step (finding a roof with snow),

If you can't find a picture with the exact same perspective, or even anywhere close.

Is there something you could do instead?

Anyways, thanks for sharing!
Marslyr
meowza

Staff meowza posted 1 year ago

Marslyr said: Wow, thanks for sharing!

Quick Question:

With the first step (finding a roof with snow),

If you can't find a picture with the exact same perspective, or even anywhere close.

Distort tool is your best friend then!
Starting with this,


Then taking a random source image of snow.
Using the lasso tool, selecting a portion of snow for our roof,


Using the distort tool to match it as close to our roof's perspective as we can,


Then cleaning off the edges. I did it with a hard eraser.


Of course you'll get a much more authentic look depending on how good your sources are, but it's possible to do it with really crappy sources too! Just takes a wee bit more work.
I spend most of my time source hunting. Let them do all the work for me!
AnythingIsPossible

AnythingIsPossible posted 1 year ago

Great tut, meowza, thanks.

But, as I've said before - source hunting is a skill in it's own right.

Cool pic.
Suran

Suran posted 1 year ago

you never cease to amaze me
Marslyr

Marslyr posted 1 year ago

Wow, thanks for the explanation!

Cheers,
Marslyr
Qasvortex

Qasvortex posted 1 year ago

This is awesome. Just wondering, since I am completely new to Aviary, I need to get used to the phoenix tools. Can you by any chance point me to the right direction where I can find good tutorials on the tools.

Thanks
- Qasvortex
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