Turn Any Portrait Into A Snowy-Wintery Photo Using These Free Snowflake Pre-Keyed Images
Dec 30, 2014
Stefan Kohler
Stefan Kohler is a full-time retoucher. He’s from Germany and likes bacon. In the last years, he built up a broad community around his retouching classes at the Infinite tool’s website.
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Here in Germany, the winter finally arrived and my Facebook timeline has turned white (or sometimes a little bit bluish because “wrong white balance”…).
I took my Camera and high power LED light to create some snow textures with shallow depth of field for composites. We are giving away those pre-keyed snowflakes for you to turn any portraits of yours to a snowy-stormy photo.
All the snowflake images have black backgrounds, so you can simply overlay a layer of snow in Photoshop using the “screen” blending mode (which is actually a “negative multiply”) . This way the black background gets transparent and you have beautiful semi transparent snowflakes.
I’ve done a little test here with 3 additional layers of snow.
To get a stronger effect, you can simply add more layers of snow.
The set consists of 32 JPEGs, all shot with a Nikon D800 and a 85mm lens. With f1.8 there is a lot of DoF, so the large snow halos in front of the lens are doing some interesting big stuff.
Feel free to use the images for your composites and share your results here in the comments if you want.
You can download the set here.
Stefan Kohler
Stefan Kohler is a full-time retoucher. He’s from Germany and likes bacon. In the last years, he built up a broad community around his retouching classes at the Infinite tool’s website.
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10 responses to “Turn Any Portrait Into A Snowy-Wintery Photo Using These Free Snowflake Pre-Keyed Images”
Sorry to point to a different solution but I really prefer to create the snowflakes on my own. Phlearn has a real good tutorial how to create them on your own – with the same (or even better) result.
sure, there are (as always) multiple ways to create things in Photoshop. I prefer real images and wanted to share them :-)
This looks great, much better than artificially created snow! There will always be people who have a different opinion (about everything..).
There are reasons for artificially generated snow. Sometimes you just need some special type of snow… I think it’s good to have some image-based ones as well as the knowledge of how to build these little cold thingys…
Thanks for the snow. Not getting a lot here in Toronto, now I can add snow fall to the outdoors.
Thanks for the sharing!
You’re welcome.
my result: https://www.facebook.com/VMphotoart/photos/a.292375104127865.71606.185854418113268/886795558019147/?type=1&theater
thank you very much for sharing this with us, saved me a lot of time in the post production
this is awesome!
Love it! Especially because it’s a studio shot.
Thank you for sharing!