Snow Effect

So then photoshoppers as we approach christmas I thought I'd get into the festive spirit and make a few Christmas tutorials! This first tutorial is going to show you how to make the same star/snow effect I've got in the header of the site. This wasn't exactly all that hard to do but it's a fiddley one so open your photoshop, and let's get to work!

Ok so first I want you to download the following image and open in in photoshop

Image Download

Ok so you have this open in photoshop. Now we need to make our image into a brush. This is quite simple, and if anyone doesn't know how to make a brush then this is how!

Click on Edit>Define Brush and a box should pop up like this:

As you can see, I named mine "Brush" - Name yours whatever you want. Once you have done this you can close the image off the screen.

Once you have done this, create a new document of any size and any background color, for this example my size is 720x540 and a nice blue bg.

On your menu bar locate the brush tool if you don't know what your menu bar is, then here it is:

The highlighted object is the brush tool, if you right click that you also have a pencil tool as well.

So we now know where to locate the brush tool, we should select the brush we want. To select the brush you want use the following method:

Now we have the brush we need to set some preferences, to do this we need to get our brush properties up. For those who don't know where this is then simply locate the following on your screen:

Where it says brushes, you should get a popup box when you click on it with the brush preferences. Set the following properties:

Once you've done that, your brush is ready to use! So now we want to play about and get a nice effect so if you want to create a new layer then take your brush and make a few splashes about the page as shown below:

Now add the following properties on the stars layer:

You can set the opacity to whatever you want, the brighter you want the star the more opacity you add. Given this 80% is quite bright!

here's what I got after adding the effect:

Now we need to add the finishing touches so go to Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen Edges then press CTRL+F about 3 times - This will just repeat the filter 3 times and you should end up with something like this:

There we have it a nice star/snow effect for your christmas headers!