In my part of the world, the snow is falling and I’m one happy girl. The flakes are the large fluffy kind that you can easily catch on your tongue. They clump together and form a white blanket over all the surfaces, but it’s light and easy to clear if you don’t have the luxury of staying inside all day. I will never get tired of watching it snow here.

Earlier this year, I was ready for the snow to start falling, but the weather wasn’t cooperating so I ended up making my own snowflakes using Adobe Photoshop and some photos of the tree branches that already lost their leaves.

It’s a fairly simple process. You start with a base image:

And then you make a copy of it, flip it horizontally and place it right next to the original image:

After that, you make a copy of those and flip them vertically so it’s like you’re creating a kaleidoscope image.

You can merge those layers together if you want – it will make the next steps a little easier. Once you have the four parts together as one, make a copy of that so it’s another layer in Photoshop, then rotate it 90 degrees.

Change your blend mode of that top layer so the layer underneath begins to show through. It doesn’t matter which blend mode you choose – whatever you think looks the best. I chose Multiply for this one, but Overlay, Vivid Light and Divide all looked great with VERY different results.

You might like your snowflake the way it is, or you can add another layer, rotating 45 degrees and changing the blend mode again.

From here, I like to clean up my creation a little and make some edits. I generally crop my snowflakes to square and then use a few of the correction tools to make my corners look more like the main part of the photo. This is also where I play around with editing to see how it changes my images. Here are a few versions of what this final snowflake could look like:

It’s pretty simple and fun to play around with if you find yourself with a few minutes to spare while the trees are still bare.

Enjoying the snow~ Angie