Making it Rain

These days, “the means of production” we proles are constantly striving for are as much digital as they are material. With that poor (and slightly Marxist) excuse, I now present you with my first Photoshop tutorial: how to digitally manipulate the weather in a photograph.

Here’s the image I started with: a photo of Big Ben. It was a cloudy day, which will help us in manipulating the sky. Generally, a monochrome sky (blue or gray) background will make this process easier, though it is still possible with a sky with cloud shapes.

1. First, you should modify the image you’re starting with to create a more “stormy” feel. Use the Hue/Saturation tool to decrease saturation to -26 to remove some of the warm tones of the summer day the photo was taken. Then, use Brightness/Contrast to darken the image and increase the contrast (-60 brightness, +36 contrast) until you get the darker, starker image you’re looking for.

2. Use the Curves tool to do some more specific modifications. Look at the following screenshot:

Notice how there are two peaks on the histogram chart. You can use these as a guidelines to darken the shadows and blacks in the image, while lightening the highlights. Your curves chart will look different depending on your image and the effect you’re trying to achieve. Here’s the result:

3. Next, create a sky mask. This will allow you to edit only the sky without obscuring the foreground. In this image, it’s fairly easy–a few clicks of the Wand tool will achieve the desired selection. Note: if you turn off the “contiguous” checkbox, you’ll be able to select all values in the image which match the one you click on, which works especially well for complex architecture, trees, or other objects where many small sections of sky show through the foreground. Once you’ve selected it, create a new layer and fill your selection with black. Then invert the selection and fill with white. Hide the layer–this will be used to easily select the sky for future modifications.

4. Now put in the clouds. There are a number of great free Photoshop brush sites out there. I got the ones I used for this tutorial from Brusheezy, which is an invaluable resource for all regular users of Photoshop. Create a new layer, select the sky again (using the mask you created) and, with a black cloud brush, begin painting dark stormclouds onto the sky. It won’t look great right now–don’t worry about that. Set the layer to “Darken”, and tone down the opacity. You may have to fiddle a bit with the edges around your foregrounds, but when you’re done you’ll have a sky full of dark stormclouds. Fiddle with your hue, saturation, brightness and contrast on both clouds and background layers until they match up fairly well.

5. Now it’s time for the rain. Create the dark “background” rain first: create a new layer, and fill it with black. Add a mask, and fill it with black:

With the mask selected, add noise to it. I add quite a bit; use less if you want the rain to look less torrential. The black layer and the mask work together to give you a blotchy collection of black noise across your image. Add a motion blur to the mask, at an angle, varying the length to achieve the effect you’re looking for.

This is your dark rain layer. Set the layer to “Darken.”

6. In an image, depth can be created by varying shades of dark and light. So, we’re also going to create some light-colored rain. Create another layer, but this time fill it with white. Use the same process in step 5: black mask, add noise, add motion blur. You’ll have an overlaid layer of white rain against the dark one you created before. Your image will still look a little flat, so now it’s time to pull out the eraser tool. Making sure the layer (not the mask) is selected, erase bits and pieces of the light rain layer. You might want to use your cloud brush again to do this. Then, use a few grayscale colors and some black to shade different areas of the light rain layer. Remember, the eye is drawn to areas of high contrast in an image, so whatever areas of white you leave will have the effect of highlighting that part of the picture. If you scroll down to see the final image, you’ll notice that I used the light rain to highlight the right side of Big Ben.

7. Now erase a few areas in the dark rain layer. Go easier on this one, as you want more background dark rain than light foreground rain.

8. Finally, create a new layer called “highlight” and set it to “Soft Light.” Select the foreground using the mask layer and use a brush to paint highlights onto the foreground. This will serve to pull out images foreground and highlight the image’s centerpiece (Big Ben’s right side, in this case). Then, deselect and use brush and eraser to touch up the highlights.

9. Fiddle with contrasts, values, and saturation on various layers until they match.

Voila: