Rain Effects

Here is a quick, relativly painless way to get good looking rain in Photoshop. This tutorial may work in other programs such as GIMP or PSP, but you'll need to modify the commands accordingly to the setup you're working with.

Begin by creating a new layer for your rain to go on. You do not want to work on the same layer that you have any of your linework or colors on because we are going to apply an effect later in this tutorial that we want to effect the rain only. Having the rain created on its own layer allows us to do this easily.

Take a small paint brush and begin placing dots or small scratches all along your image. Make sure that you are using a paintbrush or airbrush with opacity turned to 100%. You want these marks to be VERY visible. Don't worry if it looks silly.

Continue placing marks all over your image. The more marks you make, the greater the downpour will appear later. If you want a light rain, keep them fairly far apart from eachother.

We are now going to use a filter to give the rain the appearance of motion. Right now it kinda looks like snow! To do this, we will use a motion blur. You can find it under the filter menu up top under the blur subcategory.

When you select motion blur, a little popup box should appear that looks something like this. The angle will allow you to control the direction the raindrops are blurred and stretched, and thus the angle of the rain itself! The distance controls over how many pixels the blur is applied. For faster looking raindrops, make the number greater.

After the effect has been applied your rain will end up looking very transparent; it's no wonder! You did take just that little bit of "paint" and stretch it over a great distance! Duplicate your rain layer to make the streaks a little bit more noticible. You can duplicate it again and drag the new layer to your background and move it around to create even more layers of rain beyond.

Now that we have our "rain" it's time to make it look convincing. In my image, I chose to employ some mist and the starts of light and dark where clouds will be in the background. Rain is rarely without clouds or humidity, so if you're noticing that you want a little bit more of a realistic effect, this is a good place to start!

Since it is night time, I'm going to make the rain a thunderstorm. There's a lot of water on the ground, yes? Thus it will reflect the lightning I'm going to create and will create a cool light source below my character. I begin adding blues and some highlights to bring this out for my particular lighting situation.

Finally I finish off the sky by creating clouds and lightning. I make the character look wet by going in with an airbrush and putting individual drips of rain on the guy to make him look convincingly soaked. It's little details like heavy, droopy hair, drips, and rivers of water going down your character that will bring everything together. Enjoy soaking your models!