1. Take A Picture By Filter

Written by Steve Patterson.In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we'll learn how to easily add realistic falling snow to a winter photo. This version of the tutorial is for Photoshop CS5 and earlier. Photoshop CS6 and CC (Creative Cloud) users will want to check out our fully updated tutorial.Call me crazy, but I love winter. Sure, it's not always easy to drive in, and scrapping ice off the car windshield is never fun. But to me, there's nothing better than waking up to a fresh blanket of snow covering the city, or hearing that crunching sound the snow makes under my boots, or watching the snowflakes glisten and sparkle under the street lights as I take my dog for a walk in the quiet calm of a cold winter night. Or maybe it's all just a shameful excuse to drink too much hot chocolate.

'Take a Picture' is a song by American rock band Filter, released on November 16, 1999 as the second single from their second studio album Title of Record. The song became a major hit at the start of 2000, peaking at number 12 on the US Billboard Hot 100. How to Extract Zip Files. This wikiHow teaches you how to move files from a compressed, or 'ZIP', folder into an ordinary, uncompressed folder on your computer. Compressed files are typically unusable until you extract them from their ZIP.

Who knows.Of course, as with any season of the year, getting Mother Nature to pose for our photos isn't always easy. You may have found the perfect winter landscape scene or snapped a great photo of your kids building their very first snowman, and the only thing that would have made the photo even better is if it had been snowing at the time, which of course, it wasn't. Fortunately, when the weather forecast fails us, Photoshop can still save the day. In fact, one of the great things about Photoshop is that if you focus on learning techniques rather than on memorizing steps, you'll soon discover that the same techniques can be used to create entirely different effects!

In this tutorial, we're going to be adding falling snow to our photo, but if you've been following along with some of our other tutorials, you may recognize the technique we'll be using here, since we've used to same basic technique to and to. Memorizing steps can give you a serious case of tunnel vision in Photoshop, where all you ever see is what's directly in front of you. But when you focus on the techniques themselves, not the actual steps or the final results, and begin to understand the 'why' behind what you're doing, you may just find yourself staring at something one day and thinking 'You know, I bet I know how to do that in Photoshop!' Life after that will never be the same.Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial.

Take A Picture By Filter

The new layer appears above the Background layer. Step 2: Fill The New Layer With BlackNow that we have our new layer, let's fill it with black. Normally, to do anything to a specific layer, we first have to select the layer in the Layers palette, but in this case, Photoshop has automatically selected our new layer for us, so we're good to go. We can tell that 'Layer 1' is selected because it's highlighted in blue.

To fill the layer with black, we'll use Photoshop's Fill command. Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fill. The document window is now filled with black.

Step 3: Add Some NoiseLet's add some noise to this layer, which in just a few short steps will become our falling snowflakes. When most people hear the word 'Noise', they immediately think of whatever music those darn teenagers are listening to these days, but in Photoshop, noise is actually nothing more than a whole bunch of little dots. Photoshop has a filter built specifically for adding noise to an image, and by sheer coincidence, it happens to be called the Add Noise filter. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Noise, and then choose Add Noise. Go to Filter Noise Add Noise.This brings up the Add Noise filter dialog box. Use the Amount slider in the middle of the dialog box to adjust the amount of noise that's being added.

There's no specific amount to add for this effect, we just need a lot of noise. Dragging the slider to a value of around 150% or so should do the trick. At the bottom of the dialog box, select the Gaussian option, and way down at the very bottom, select the Monochromatic option, which will give us little black and white dots for our noise instead of the default red, green and blue dots. The image is now filled with noise. Step 4: Apply Some Blurring To The NoiseLet's soften our noise up a little bit by applying some blurring to it.

This will also help to clump some of the little dots together, creating different sizes and shapes for our snowflakes! The most popular way to blur something in Photoshop is with the Gaussian Blur filter because it's very simple to use and yet still gives us control over the amount of blurring being applied, but for this effect, we can use something even simpler. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and then choose Blur More. Go to Filter Blur Blur More.The Blur and Blur More commands have been around since forever in Photoshop and both give us a quick, no-hassle way of blurring an image.

Blur offers a subtle amount of blurring, and Blur More offers a slightly stronger amount. Problem is, as you may have noticed when you applied the Blur More command, there's no dialog box associated with them, which means we have no control over the amount of blurring that's applied. Normally, that's a bad thing, and it's a good reason to stick with the Gaussian Blur filter or one of the other more advanced blurring filters in Photoshop. For this effect though, all we needed was a subtle amount of blurring to apply to our noise, so this was a rare case where the Blur More command worked just fine. Step 5: Reduce The Amount Of Noise With The Levels CommandAt this point, our document is filled with lots of noise. Too much noise, in fact.

We need to get rid of some of it so our noise looks more like snowflakes and less like, well, noise. For that, we'll use Photoshop's Levels command.

Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Adjustments, and then choose Levels. Go to Image Adjustments Levels.This brings up the Levels dialog box. In the center of the dialog box is a graph known as a histogram which gives us a visual representation of the tonal, or brightness, range of our image. In other words, it shows us how many in the image, if any, are pure black, how many, if any, are pure white, and where the rest of the pixels fall along the brightness scale between black and white. Directly below the histogram are three little sliders - a black one on the far left, a white one on the far right, and a gray one in the middle.

We're going to use these sliders to not only remove much of the noise but also to brighten the noise so that our snowflakes appear white and not some dull gray color.First, to brighten the noise, click on the white slider below the histogram and drag it to the left until it's just past the point where the right side of the histogram slope begins. You'll see the noise in your image become brighter. Then, to remove much of the noise, click on the black slider and drag it to the right. As you drag the black slider, you'll see large areas of the noise getting progressively darker and eventually disappearing into pure black. The image after reducing the amount of noise with the Levels command.

Step 6: Change The Blend Mode Of The Layer To 'Screen'Things are starting to look a bit more wintry, but we do have one small problem. We've created all these nice white specks to use as snowflakes in our photo, but we can't actually see our photo! It's still being blocked from view. We need to hide all the black areas on the layer while keeping the white specks visible. Fortunately, Photoshop makes this incredibly easy thanks to layer blend modes! Blend modes give us all kinds of interesting ways to blend layers together, and one of them in particular will do exactly what we're looking for. With 'Layer 1' still selected, go up to the Blend Mode option at the top of the Layers palette.

It doesn't actually say 'Blend Mode' anywhere, but you'll see a drop-down box that by default is set to 'Normal'. This is the Blend Mode option. Select the Screen blend mode from the list. The snow now appears to be falling at a slight angle. Step 8: Duplicate The LayerNow 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'. Go to Edit Transform 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' FilterWe 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.

Go to Filter Pixelate 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.

The image after applying the Crystallize filter. Step 11: Apply The 'Motion Blur' FilterWe need to give our larger snowflakes some motion so they look more realistic in the photo. Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and then choose Motion Blur once again. When the Motion Blur dialog box appears, leave the Angle set to -65° so the larger snowflakes appear to be falling at the same angle as the smaller ones. Since these flakes are larger than the original ones we created, we'll need to increase the length of the motion blur a little bit. Set your Distance option to around 16 pixels.

Full moons—whether they’re Supermoons or not—make great subjects to photograph, and its easier than ever to shoot the moon with the Nikon and its built-in Moon Scene Mode. The COOLPIX P900 has an 83x optical zoom which means it’s the equivalent focal length of 2000mm. Use the camera’s Dynamic Fine Zoom, an enhanced digital zoom that effectively doubles the reach—to a 4000mm equivalent! Want to get even closer?

Enable the digital zoom and you’re up to the equivalent of a 8000mm lens.The P900’s Vibration Reduction image stabilization means you can handhold the camera as you zoom into the moon. The lens is so powerful that zooming the camera in all the way means part of the moon will get cropped out—so you actually have to zoom out a little bit to get the entire moon in your shot.Exposing for the light of the full moonThe COOLPIX P900 features a Moon Scene Mode. Select it and the camera will optimize the settings, focusing at infinity, in the center of the frame. You may also want to use a tripod, and if you do, remember to set the VR to OFF in the setup menu.

Don’t have a tripod? Brace yourself against a sturdy object or place the camera on a sturdy surface and use the Vari-angle LCD to compose the image.If you’re using any of the PSAM exposure modes, setting the camera’s exposure manually or use program or shutter or aperture priority, you may want to underexpose the image to ensure that the detail of the craters on the moon’s surface aren’t blown out.

Using Spot metering will also help you get the correct exposure for the moon, which will be the brightest part of your image. Use a shutter speed of at least 1/15 second or faster since the moon actually moves pretty fast across the sky.If you lose sight of your subject while zoomed in, press the Snap-Back Zoom button for a quick zoomed-out view. Find your subject again and then release the button—the P900 will zoom right back in.What about the foreground landscape?Photographing the moon along with the foreground landscape can be tricky because of the wide dynamic range. Exposing for the foreground might cause the moon to be overexposed, and exposing for the moon might cause the foreground to be too dark. In this case the optimum solution may be to create a multiple exposure or composite.There are a few ways that you can add the moon to another image for a more interesting composition.

One of those techniques is by using the Multiple Exposure function that is incorporated into the COOLPIX P900. Another technique is to photograph the moon and the landscape as separate images and combine them together using an image-editing program.Use the same focal length that you shoot the landscape with, when you photograph the moon, for the most realistic look in the final composite.

It also makes the actual compositing easier to do. If you’re using a wide-angle lens and the moon is a small element, it likely won’t cause the overall image to suffer if the moon is blown out with no visible details.Other ways to get creative: set the Picture Control in the camera to B&W since the moon against the black sky is pretty much a monochromatic image. Use some of the fun effects that are built-into the camera for a unique view.

Shoot video as you zoom into your shot, or experiment with time lapse of the moon’s movement across the sky. ( Check your User's Manual to see exactly how to use the features in the camera.).