Step 7: Apply The "Motion Blur" Filter

Our snowflakes are still looking a little harsh, and they also look like they're just stuck on the photo rather than falling from the sky. Let's give them some motion using Photoshop's Motion Blur filter. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and then choose Motion Blur:

This brings up the Motion Blur dialog box. At the bottom of the dialog box are the two controls for the filter. The first one is Angle, where we can set the direction we want our snowflakes to be falling from. Set it to around -65°. Below that is the Distance option where we decide how much of a motion trail we want an object to have. Let's give our snowflakes just a hint of motion, not too much. I'm going to set mine to around 8 pixels:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box, and your falling snowflakes should now look more realistic:

Step 8: Duplicate The Layer

Now that we have one layer of falling snow, let's use it to create a second layer, this time with bigger snowflakes, to give the snow a sense of depth. First, let's duplicate "Layer 1". Go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy. Or, for a much faster way, simply press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Either way duplicates "Layer 1" and if we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a new layer named "Layer 1 copy" sitting above "Layer 1":

Step 9: Rotate The New Layer 180°

Let's try to cover up the fact that we're using a copy of the exact same snowflakes by rotating the new layer 180°. With "Layer 1 copy" selected in the Layers palette, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen, choose Transform, then choose Rotate 180°:

This way, the snowflakes on the new layer will still appear to be falling at the same angle as the originals on "Layer 1" but they'll be spaced out differently. In fact, it will now look like you have twice as much snow falling in your image, when all we've done is made a copy of our original snowflakes layer and rotated it.

Step 10: Apply The "Crystallize" Filter

We need to convert our small snowflakes into bigger ones, and for this effect, Photoshop's Crystallize filter works nicely. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Pixelate, and then choose Crystallize:

This brings up the Crystallize filter dialog box. The Crystallize filter breaks an image into little sections, or "cells", of color, and you can adjust the size of the cells with the Cell Size option at the bottom of the dialog box. The default value of 10 usually works well for this effect. If you look in the preview area of the dialog box, you'll see that our snowflakes have increased in size. They don't exactly look like snowflakes at the moment, but we'll fix that in a moment:

Click OK to exit out of the dialog box. The photo now has a nice mix of small snowflakes and larger, well, white shapes that will look more like snowflakes once we give them some motion:

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