This picture was really retouched in photoshop quite a lot. Although I rendered the model in front of a blurred background, I used the alpha-channel to separate the model from the background during the process of postproduction several times.
Most of you will know photoshop so I don´t explain the basics.
The falling rain was completely created in photoshop though and maybe some of you would like to know how I did it.
First of all I created a separate layer and added a pure black-white cloud-pattern, using the “rendering à create clouds” option (maybe it´s called different in english, I´m working with the german version of ps). Then the clouds are modified with the “mezzotint”-filter, using long-lines. This will just give us some nice parallel contrasts within the clouds. Then I applied a motion-blur to the layer and rotatet the direction until I got the right angle for the rain to come from. Now all that had to be done was, to play around with the fill-settings of the layer, that means, the way in which one layer interacts with the layers beneath. I chose “lighten” so only the bright elements of the rain became visual. Then I cloned the layer and chose a slightly different angle for the motion blur to get rid of the parallel look of the raindrops. This way I created crossed lines which looked a lot better then parallel raindrops.
And that´s it! Some colour-corrections, some blurring and sharpening of different areas and a slight glow in the white areas and I was finished.
Last but not least, here´s a little wireframe with everything included except the raindrops:
If you have any questions concerning this making of, please feel free to Email me, but I can´t answer general questions about Max like “what´s a polygon, how do you extrude a face”.
