How to Make Draping Snow in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to make a really cool looking snow effect on image elements. If you are making Christmas or seasonal graphics, you will definitely want to know how to do this.

To get started, you first create a new document and fill the background with a dark color of your choosing. You do this so you can see the snow better as you are making it. You can change the background color when you are finished, if you like.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will add the snow to text, but you could use it with other elements as well. First, use your type tool to type in whatever you want to say. "Merry Christmas" is always a good one. Now, you should select the lasso tool. Use it to draw your selections on top of your one of your letters. Your snow will go inside this selection, so make it look like it is draping over the letter a bit from the top.

Next, you want to continue by creating the same type of selection for the rest of the letters (or other elements, if you are not using text). To do this, you need to add to the selection. To do this, select "Add to Selection". It is very important that you get this part just the way you want it, so take your time doing this. Remember, you can always undo if you don't like a selection.

Now switch to your Channels palette and make a new channel by clicking on the "new channel" icon. Go to the bottom of the toolbar, and reset the background and foreground colors to default. . Then use the Paint bucket tool to fill in the selection with white. Then deselect your selection.

Then go to Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur, and set the radius to 3px, though you can play around with this a bit. Now go to Image->Adjustments->Levels, and adjust the levels so that the image is sharp, but smooth.

Now create a new layer. Go to Select->Load Selection, in the load selection panel, in the channel field, select Alpha 1. Then, in the new layer, fill in the selection with white. Now you should deselect. Add some shade to the snow, by going to Layer->Layer-Style->Bevel Emboss.

Now, you can add different background image, or paint on the background., You might also want to make changes to the text layer, by adding, say, Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay, Stroke to the layer. That's it!