15 December 2004, 16:46 by mark hoekstra

how to make snowflakes…

Well, I thought this would be a no-brainer, but as usual, the simplest ideas take the most effort to actually make it happen… So, I thought, let’s make a chrsitmascard for family&friends and such. In these kind of things I act on impulse, so with my already obsolete Fuji Finepix 1300 I made a pic and I wanted it to look like it was snowing in my apartment. Taking the picture took 2 minutes, getting some snow in the picture a lot longer. Whereever I searched, I came across pages with howto’s to make one snowflake, fractalized and such, all beautiful but that’s not what I wanted! ;-)

So, in the end, after some thorough Googlin’ I came across some free Photoshop-plugins which did the trick. One for the snowflakes and one for the snow on the text…

VanDerLee’s Adrenaline Plugins

...and I’m quite pleased with the result :-)

snowflakes-xmascard.thumb.jpg

In the end it became a cross-application/cross-platform christmascard, but I think that’s appropriate for me ;-) I made the text as a transparent gif in PaintShop Pro, the snow in Photoshop and some filtering with GIMP on my workstation. Of course, it all can be done in Photoshop alone, but well, I know how to do one thing in one application, another in another and a third in a third…

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