Making Rain from a Filter

Rain Title image

Sometime last year, I stumbled over a lesson for making realistic water drops from Joseph Apice. I enjoyed playing with the lesson, but noticed that I hadn't seen any lessons for making actual rain in PSP. I did eventually find Mahogany's rain mask that she made and the Sumrall Works lesson that inspired her. The mask and lesson were closer to what I was trying for, but still too subtle for me to see in an animation. I messed around with several images and then gave up on rain for a while.

As I was reading through the information on a new filter, I noticed they mentioned that the filter could do rain, as well as fog and clouds. Curious, I began to play, and applied that knowledge I gained from those other rain lessons since the documentation omitted further rain discussion. Interestingly, depending on what you do, the filter can create water drops or falling rain.

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Sources

You will need to download Van Der Lee's Snowflakes filter from their site, if you don't already have it.

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  1. Open your image you wish to add the rain to and make a SHIFT-D copy of it. Close your original image.
  2. Add new layer, Rain.

    Step 2 finished

  3. Set your Foreground color to #C0C0C0.

    Step 3 finished

  4. Open the Snowflakes Filter. (I set my filter preview window to 100%.)
  5. Now, you control your results. I'm giving value ranges to play with where possible. Feel free to experiment on your own! A higher amount and/or higher size end = Heavier rain. Changing only random seed creates rain frames for a steady animated rainfall. Don't panic at my purple rain. I chose that color instead of gray so you could see it more easily in my example.

    Step 5 settings

     

    Step 5 done

  6. Now, you create the rain direction. Go to Effects->Blur->Motion Blur and choose an angle between 90-270. 180 is straight down. Choose 40 pixels.

    Step 6 settings

     

    Completed Rain

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Sample

Animated rain in lighthouse photo

For those struggling with creating an animation, I've finally decided to provide the steps I used for this lighthouse sample. If you follow the directions, you will end up with a rain pattern similar to mine, animated. If you need still more detail, click on HELP in PSP or visit one of the many other fine Animation tutorials on the Internet. We'll pretend you applied the snow and motion blur to 4 different rain layers like I did.

so you have:

This is the way I do mine... was only way I could keep jiggles away from my images when animating:

  1. hide only the following layers:
    • rain2
    • rain3
    • rain4
    Save COPY AS .gif...... for my memory, I name it rain1.gif
  2. Hide only the following layers:
    • Rain1
    • Rain3
    • Rain4
    Save COPY AS .gif...... for my memory, I name it rain2.gif
  3. Hide only the following layers:
    • Rain1
    • Rain2
    • Rain4
    Save COPY AS .gif...... for my memory, I name it rain3.gif
  4. Hide only the following layers:
    • Rain1
    • Rain2
    • Rain3
    Save COPY AS .gif...... for my memory, I name it rain4.gif
  5. Now..... save the original psp file... just in case of Murphy's Law. I name mine something like rainsomething.psp
  6. Open Animation shop. I always use the wizard to animate my stuff... Otherwise I forget how. ;) So, use the wizard, load the Rain1.gif, Rain2.gif,Rain3.gif, and Rain4.gif files and keep them in that order. I named the files so they'd be in order when I gathered them up in the AS wizard..... I am forgetful too. ;)
  7. Once you've run the wizard, you'll need to save the created file. I named mine lighthouseANI.gif.

(I used the Almathera Puddle filter on the lagoon to make it appear the rain is hitting the surface. Lighthouse pictured is the Bolivar Point Lighthouse which is across the channel from Galveston, Texas, and is a personal photo.)

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