Tutorial: Creating Rainy Pictures With Textures

Open up a photo or image you wish to add a rainy day effect to. 

Below is a snapshot taken from the beautiful Nordari.

and this is what we ended up with:

First download the “grungy rain texture” and place it onto a layer above your background image (feel free to use the photos above if you want to follow along exactly).  You can stretch the rainy texture if needed to fit with your photo and then set to soft light.  Looks good already, that’s the great thing with textures – you can add one and instantly change the feel of the whole photo or add a whole lot more, take bits away, change the overlay …… the list is endless.

2.  Duplicate both layers.

3.  Then on the copy of the picture only – Filter – blur – Gaussian Blur – 70.2

4.  Now merge the blurred image and the copy of the grungy rain texture.

4.  Set the new layer to Multiply and reduce the opacity to about 84%.

4.  You can stop there or play around a bit more with the light and colour.  Click on the icon (circled in red) in the layers palette and a menu should fly out – select Hue/Saturation, decrease the saturation  until you are happy (I left it at -52)

6.  Click on the same icon again and this time select Curves.  Pull the middle of  the line up slightly.  Again play around with this until you are happy with the effect.  The one good thing about adding adjustments (such as curves, hue/saturation) as separate layers is that later you can tweak them further without destroying or having to undo several times.

7.  Add a bit of light, as if the sun has managed to peek through the rain clouds.  On a new layer create a circle and then fill with an off white colour, using the Gaussian Blur again bur the light circle slightly.

8.  Set the circle layer to overlay and reduce the opacity.  Move the circle about, stretch it until you are happy with the way the light falls.

and that’s it really.

Try out the other textures in the Rainy Day Pack and see what effects you can come up with.  Below I used “Grey skies” and “Light through the rain” both set to soft light.

Stay tuned because next time we’ll be looking at blending multiple textures in one picture :)

1. 

   Mauricette Morane says:

   September 26, 2010 at 5:46 pm

   Wonderful tutorial, and the pictures are very beautiful :-)
2. 

   Amisha March says:

   September 27, 2010 at 12:48 pm

   Thank you Mauricette :) (btw I could have swore I saw you over at Nordari when I was there yesterday taking pictures?)
3. 

   Galad says:

   August 28, 2011 at 2:49 pm

   I am a complate newbee with this.
   What program do you use to add the layers?
   I think it looks stunning.

   Galad
4. 

   Amisha March says:

   August 29, 2011 at 8:53 am

   Galad, we use Photoshop. You can check it out here and download a free trial :D