what's up everyone today I'm going to be
showing you how to photograph and use
real snow for your overlays in Photoshop
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I see tons of tutorials online showing
you how to create snow in Photoshop but
in my opinion none of them are actually
that convincing so the best thing to do
is actually use genuine snow so doing
something like this is actually really
simple you just want a black or grey
background and that's going to make it
really easy to just get the snow in the
Photoshop and extract it out of the
background for this I'm just using a
four foot by six foot collapsible
backdrop it's probably a good idea to
use a tripod for something like this so
you can experiment with your shutter
speed and aperture settings
unfortunately I can't give you any
recommendations as far as the settings
go because the lens and how fast the
snow is falling and how dense it is all
affects what your going to need to do
I also took pictures in both portrait
and landscape orientation so I could use
them overtop of either type of photo and
still have the snow going in their
proper direction once we have photos
were satisfied with we're just going to
take them into Photoshop and I'm going
to show you a few things you might need
to do to prep them to actually use the
photo we're going to use today is a
portrait of a sponsored ski boarder and
we're doing this for the sponsors
website and to make this look like it
wasn't shot in the studio I'm going to
add snow overlays so I've already gone
ahead and picked some of the good ones
that we're going to use today and the
first things that we're going to do to
this is convert it to black and white
just so there aren't any color casts
that we're bringing in to the other
photo and we're also going to do a
curves adjustment to give this more
contrast you want the darkest parts of
the photo to be really dark or else
you're going to get a lot of detail
coming forward that you don't want so
like I said just do a black and white
conversion just hit Auto doesn't need to
be precise and we're going to make a
nice s-curve on here probably bring down
the shadows make them nice and dark
maybe even pull the black point over and
then I want to combine all these so just
shift-click all of them and then
command e and now combine it and we're
going to do that with the others as well
so black and white curves adjustment
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all right once we have those all
adjusted we're just going to hit command
a thank you man C to copy and paste it
and we're going to bring it over on top
of this photo
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I'm also using more than one snow layer
here so we can create some depth and
blur some of the ones in the background
so it doesn't look too flat so for this
first one I'm just going to constrain it
to the proportions of the photo and I'm
actually going to mask around him and
this is going to be for behind the
subject and I already made this
selection earlier so I'm just going to
use the same one again I'm gonna toggle
this on just click the mask tool once
you have your mask actually cut out and
you can see now it's behind him so I'm
actually going to take this layer and
blur it so it looks like it's more in
the background I'm just gonna use a
Gaussian blur for that and probably
probably around there is good
might want to turn the opacity down a
bit and I'm also going to change the
blend modes on these to lighten my
believe ya waitin is one we're gonna go
with for some of these and again just
adding these I'm going to actually blow
this one up pretty big over top
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come down into the blend modes hit
lighten the other thing that you might
need to do is to mask out some of the
flakes in front of your the subject
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so this was a really big soft brush for
this and going with a black brush and
get rid of some of the stuff that's
blocking him
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and you can just keep going with new
layers add that on top come down the
lighting again so the reason also why
I'm using lighten is because if you use
screen it'll get progressively lighter
and lighter as you go and you definitely
don't want that
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so maybe one more and obviously these
since these are on layers you can adjust
them to look however you like this is
far too dense right now so I'm probably
going to turn the opacity down on some
of these
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and again mask out what's in front of
him
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all right that's pretty much it like I
said this is a really simple technique
and it's going to allow you a ton of
possibilities as far as editing goes
shooting real snow is of course going to
look a lot more organic than anything
you can artificially generate in
Photoshop and it's another reason why I
like doing it this way if you would
actually do portraits in the snow it
would also be much harder to remove the
snow over top of their face in a raw
file versus an overlay I think it's much
easier to shoot overlays like this and
use them later than it is to actually
plan to shoot when it's snowing and you
just might not live in an area where it
snows often so this would be a great
technique for you to have in your tool
box either way this is a simple and
versatile technique thank you for
watching I hope you find this technique
useful and don't forget to Like and
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