Animated Snow

Celebrate the holiday season by learning how to use Photoshop to create falling snow over your favorite holiday image.

Corey Barker is Executive Producer of PlanetPhotoshop.com and is an Education and Curriculum Developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Corey has also made numerous appearances on the highly rated podcast, PhotoshopUser TV, and is co-host of Layers TV.

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35 Comments

yann+ said on — December 12, 2008 @ 12:39 pm

Nice, lovely trick ! Loving the tuts ! Greetz +
Abraham said on — December 12, 2008 @ 12:49 pm

Great tutorial – am having a problem, am using Photoshop CS3 Extended. When i get to the animation part, measurement log is grayed out (I can’t fiddle with the settings)

any advice with be appreciated!
Jimmy S, said on — December 12, 2008 @ 3:33 pm

Great tutorial!
Mads said on — December 12, 2008 @ 4:29 pm

Hi Corey. This is amazing.

Thank you for yet another great photoshop-animaition tip.

I will order your dvd on animaiting in photoshop soon

Merry christmas.

- Mads from Denmark
Connor said on — December 12, 2008 @ 10:12 pm

Great tutorial Corey! After your animated rain tutorial i used a similar technique to create a floating mist effect, and wanted to achieve something similar to this, now i finally can.
Bob Murray said on — December 13, 2008 @ 8:50 am

Perfect technique for the holidays! CS4 Extended is cool.
These effects work great even without the animation. Thanks.
François said on — December 13, 2008 @ 9:33 am

Très beau tutoriel! Very nice tutorial. Very simply to do and gives a very nice result.
Once again Bravo! From Laval, Québec.
Laurie said on — December 13, 2008 @ 10:13 am

As usual, yours is the best tutorial for falling snow. Thanks so much for giving clear, step-by-step directions that produce great results.
Just Me said on — December 13, 2008 @ 9:21 pm

WOW! Your tutorials are always cool but I think you outdid your self… this is amazing. Just great. Thanks Corey and Happy Holidays!
Brodey said on — December 14, 2008 @ 6:59 am

Thats Awesome But How Do I Save What Format?
Traffiks said on — December 15, 2008 @ 11:00 am

Hi! Thanks for awesome tut, but Im having one problem. When needed to go to distort>displace I cant pick it, because it is grey. What’s the problem?
Dianne said on — December 15, 2008 @ 2:41 pm

Brody, I had the same question. Perhaps you figured it out already.

Looks like File > Export > Render Video.

Yeah! My first animation, hehe.
Pooky said on — December 15, 2008 @ 11:45 pm

Excellent tutorial, Corey. You are the BEST.
Writers Block, White Dogs, Corey Barker and the Canon Blogger. Pingback on — December 16, 2008 @ 12:32 am

[...] http://www.planetphotoshop.com/animated-snow.html [...]
Andrea said on — December 17, 2008 @ 1:08 pm

Hey Corey,
Great video. I have 2 questions… can I download the video to watch when I don’ t have access to the internet ? It would be nice to send the photo with falling snow as an email greeting card. How do I save it and how big is the typical file ? How do I email it I guess is what I am asking. Thanks again for all the great stuff you bring to us ! happy Holidays… Andrea
Vu said on — December 18, 2008 @ 1:40 pm

Thank you Corey. Can someone show me how to export this out to .fla or flash file?
Traffiks said on — December 19, 2008 @ 4:52 am

Yea, I really need to know how to save this animation to .swf (flash) file too.
Chip said on — December 19, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

I went to save for web and devices and saved it as a gif file. Worked fine. Not sure how to save as flash.
Eric Gossler said on — December 19, 2008 @ 2:07 pm

Frickin’ brilliant! I had figured everything out on my own except for the displacement map.
eurydice said on — December 20, 2008 @ 11:37 am

I’ve done this tut and added another layer with small snow behind with displacement also to get that feeling of depth and it looks great in CS3, it is 800 pix wide and 72dpi but when I save for the web, and want it to loop, it runs out of memory. It’s only 4 seconds long and I have a 2gig processor and 4 gigs of ram. I can’t figure out how to get it to save as looped. it will either run just 4 seconds, or not allow me to save.. basically all it has to do is start over.. but with the timeline, I don’t see where to get it to do that .. What am I doing wrong? I don’t have fireworks so basically need help
medinnersready said on — December 20, 2008 @ 10:34 pm

Corey ur site is the most amazing Photoshop site I have ever seen. Not only your knowledge but your insight in design and creativity – Excellent.
Kathleen King said on — January 4, 2009 @ 11:48 pm

I have only been working with Photoshop Elements 5 and have been able to animate snow, but only a blinking type of snow. I viewed your tutorial and wow, great. Will I be able to do this with Photoshop CS3?

Thank you.
Jason Farrugia said on — January 5, 2009 @ 6:42 pm

hi Corey

always amazing your tutorials. i would like to use same picture you used is there any site you downloaded it. i’m waiting to try it out. i even added an animation to curtains tutorial the spotlight moving came pretty good.

thanks in advance and keep us dreaming

Jason
powerleg5 said on — January 6, 2009 @ 1:04 pm

I wish I could make those animations on my pics but it doesn’t appear that version 7.0 has those capabilities.
Tony Younes said on — January 25, 2009 @ 8:06 am

Thats amazing! Good stuff!
Noelia said on — February 27, 2009 @ 6:51 pm

Hello.. thanks for the tutorial its really good..i did it but i’m having problems when i try to save it.. its not working.. can someone help me? thank you..
Connor said on — March 18, 2009 @ 7:12 am

The Displacement map is a really great addition to the snow, however it slows down the animation ALOT and increases the file size when i try to save for web and devices by alot also, my document is only 350×150 px at 72 dpi and it’s still at a hefty 3mb, doesn’t sound like much, but i doubt anybody wants to wait around for about 5 minutes while my picture loads, it may also annoy people who don’t want me wasting their bandwidth.

Is there a way i can optimise the animation without loosing too much detail?
randomn said on — September 29, 2009 @ 6:13 am

Is it possible to save animations as an animated GIF, so you can mobilize it out of photoshop?
Dan said on — November 19, 2009 @ 5:47 pm

I created a great looking snow falling effect for my image but Im having trouble saving the file. Not sure if I am doing this correctly.

I am saving this as a gif dithered format. The snow is falling very slow when I preview it in Windows but works perfect in MAC. I need the snow to move faster.

The image size is 1022 x 226 pixels at a 350 DPI. Not sure how this should be saved so it previews correctly on the web.

Can anyone help me please?

Thanks in advance.
Brian said on — November 30, 2009 @ 12:30 am

I wanted to know how to get the flash style animated “window”.
Mine looks like image ready, and I dont see an option to change it to the “flash” style.

Thanks for you help.
Saety said on — November 30, 2009 @ 10:45 am

hi
wonderful tutorial
i really hang on it
Somebody said on — December 9, 2009 @ 2:28 pm

Brilliant!
Me said on — December 13, 2009 @ 2:54 pm

Absolutely Ace 5*
Corey Barker said on — December 15, 2009 @ 11:41 am

Shift-Delete
Martin said on — December 22, 2009 @ 10:34 pm

Great Tutorial! Keep up the great work.

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Animated Snow

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