Tutorial

1. Rain FX

Before starting this tutorial please note that it requires the latest version of Adobe Fireworks, Fireworks 8 and later.

Rain, rain! Who doesn't love rain? Do you want to create an artificial rain effect on your pics? It is very easy, only 1 object is needed, and it makes use of Fireworks standard Live Filters.

2. Picture

First we need a picture, any picture would do, (It works best if the picture is taken outdoors, you can see the sky, clouds, mountains or etc.) On this tutorial, we will use the sample picture of Windows XP, blue hills.



3. Add Noise

We need to draw a rectangle, using the rectangle tool, fill it with a white background, scale the size depending on the picture we are going to use, in this case, a 206 x 154 rectangle. Then in the Properties panel go to Filters > Noise > Add noise, here I used 19 for the amount and color unchecked.



4. Add Blur

Lastly, we add another Live Filter to give the impression of rain. Select Blur > Motion Blur. Motion Blur Settings: Angle 300, Distance 84. Select the rectangle, then change the layer Blend mode from Normal to Negation. And there you are, you have just created an artificial rain!





5. Tweaks

Well, that was easy right? You still feel, you need to add more rain? Just duplicate the rectangle and there you go. You could also adjust the duplicated rectangle to the right or left, top or down a bit if you choose too. And you can duplicate more "rain" rectangles as you wish.

You may also tweak with the Noise and Blur filters. To get more rain, for example, you can either increase the amount of noise to 24 or reduce the Distance in Motion Blur filter to 19.



Tip: If you feel the artificial rain is overlapping your picture, just convert it to bitmap and crop the corners. The duplicated rectangles needs to be moved around to create variety, just see the position when you download this .png. You could change the direction of the rain on the motion blur filter. Thank you for reading the tutorial.