While not a record breaking year for snow fall in Nova Scotia, it certainly feels that way. Up until January, we had little to no snow. Since then, we have had about 5 big snow storms that have accumulated roughly 240 cm…thats almost 2.5 meters of snow! Needless to say, we are buried.

But funny enough, I actually love snow. This amount is quite excessive, but I just love when it is actually snowing.  It is so beautiful. I especially love how the world is so silent and bright right after a snowfall. You can’t go anywhere (safely) so it means snuggling in close and enjoying time inside together.

After a recent snowfall, I decided to go outside and snap some pictures. When I got them home and started to edit them, I thought they would be perfect candidates for adding in snow post-production.

Here are some of the steps I followed using Photoshop Elements that I followed from the book 52 Weekend Digital Photo Projects:

1. Open your snow image in Photoshop Elements (or if you have Photoshop that works as well!).

2. Go to Layer>New Layer. Name it “Snow1”. Next, click Edit>Fill Layer, change contents to black. Next, go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise, use an amount of 15% and set options to Gaussian and Monochromatic. Click Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and use 0.3px.

3. Go to Layer>New Layer. Select “Screen” from the Mode menu. Name this layer “Snow2”. Go to Edit>Fill Layer, change contents to white. Go to Filter>Pixelate>Pointilize, use a cell of 5. Press Cmd+U to desaturate layer. Cmd+I to invert.

4. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and this time use 1px. Click OK then press Cmd+L to open the layers palette. Set black point slider to 0, midtones to 0.2, and white to 40.

5. Create new layer, naming it “Snow3”, and changing mode to screen. Go to Edit>Fill Layer and set contents to black. Apply pointilize filter again, using cell size of 10. Desaturate this new layer, invert color as before, apply same levels, Gaussian blur, and blending mode.

6. Press Cmd+J to make a new layer, naming it “Snow 4”. Press Cmd+T and increase height and width to 500%.

You might have to adjust the opacity of the levels to make the background level visible. I also used the eraser tool to selectively erase some patches of snow.

And there you have it! A cool new way to spice up a photo that might otherwise be pretty flat. Let me know if you try it and it works out!