The Artfkt collection library
Weather
Lay weather over the picture
Weather brings falling weather, wet surfaces, and storm illumination into an image. Choose rain in the air, splashes on a plane, snow at different apparent depths, or water moving across a pane.
Use the collection to establish a viewpoint as well as a mood. Looking through a wet window is a different composition from watching rain fall in front of the subject.
Included in Artfkt for Mac. All collections, one desktop studio.
Decide where the weather belongs
Streak Rain distributes broken exposure streaks across apparent depth, with softer foreground rain and coherent wind. Snow Fall uses irregular flakes, flutter, and gusts. Snow’s Settle control biases coverage toward the bottom; it does not build an accumulating layer of snow on objects.
Rain Splash places short-lived impacts and broken elliptical ripples on an adjustable perspective plane. Align that plane with a visible surface before increasing the number of impacts. A convincing placement matters more than making the shower dense.
Treat the pane as its own optical surface
Window Rain refracts the source through fine beads and larger moving lobes, with trails left as water flows. Wiper Pass supplies its own wet pane and an outward-and-return blade that clears a sector, pushes a wet edge, and allows water to return.
A wiper clears the water it owns, not rain already embedded upstream in the picture. Decide which effect supplies falling weather and which supplies the foreground pane. Keeping those roles distinct prevents a supposedly cleared view from remaining covered by an unrelated rain layer.
Use illumination as a separate decision
Lightning Flash combines a branching channel with brief repeated illumination around a strike. Bolt can be set to zero when the composition needs storm light without a visible lightning shape. Its brightness should be judged in playback as well as in an isolated frame.
Dark backgrounds make fine rain and snow easier to see, but not every region needs equal coverage. Keep the main subject readable through the weather, and use restrained illumination when the effect is supporting a photograph rather than becoming the event itself.
Effects in Weather
6 effects to explore and combine.
Streak Rain
Depth-distributed fine, broken exposure streaks, with softer foreground rain and coherent wind. Bend adds a local optical warp.
Window Rain
Fine stationary beads and larger flowing water lobes refract the image through their height gradient. Water leaves trails as it moves; overlapping lobes merge in a bounded height field.
Wiper Pass
A self-contained wet pane with a continuous outward-and-return blade. It clears water in the swept sector, pushes a narrow wet edge, leaves residue and refills.
Rain Splash
Small irregular impacts on an adjustable perspective plane: brief crown highlights, droplets and fading broken elliptical ripples.
Snow Fall
Depth-distributed irregular flakes, individual flutter, coherent gusts and soft foreground defocus. Settle biases coverage toward the bottom without accumulating snow.
Lightning Flash
A thin tapered branching channel with brief repeated illumination of the same strike, plus spatially weighted storm light. Bolt zero keeps illumination alone.
Creative applications
- Place falling rain in front of a street or architectural image while preserving a visible subject.
- Create the viewpoint of a photograph seen through wet glass.
- Build a restrained storm-light variation of an otherwise still composition.
Starting workflow
- For a wet-window cover, choose an image with clear shapes and a few light-dark boundaries that will reveal refraction.
- Apply Window Rain and begin with Distortion to see how the water changes the view.
- Balance the beads, larger lobes, and trails while checking that the main subject can still be recognized.
- Play the composition to assess the moving water. Compare Wiper Pass as an alternative when a clearing gesture is part of the idea.
- Keep any separate upstream rain intentional, and inspect the result at final size before adding storm illumination.
Make it part of your next composition.
Combine Weather with other collections, images, and editable text in Artfkt for Mac.