Okay, as you could guess, we are going to make a cool, snowy and even arctic photo effect. Select a photo of a girl or boy you are willing to freeze. Ours come from sxc.hu

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We are going to work a lot with duplicated layers so please pay attention when I say you should duplicate your existing layer. So… Please duplicate the layer. Select the upper one and go to Image >> Adjustments >> Gradient Map. Use one of the default gradients (dark blue to white), and if it makes your image look like a negative, check the “Reverse” box. Otherwise just click OK.

While your blueish layer is selected, go to layers panel and set its setting to “Color”, then reduce the Opacity of th layer to about 73%. If you see that your image is too dark or too blue, you can reduce the opacity even more, BUT… at your own risk, okay?

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Now, what characterises a cold face in snow? Pale lips, eyebrows covered in snow… we are doing to achieve this effect extremely easy. In your layers panel select the first layer (the colorful one) and using the “Dodge Tool” with soft 40px brush, go over the lips area and then carefully over the eyebrows to make them significantly paler. Surprisingly when you will be going over the eyebrows, it will give you an effect of them being gently and naturally covered with snow. I recommend to go over the eyebrows with your dodge tool only once, while it’s Range set to “midtones” and Exposure to “26%”. The trick is to make it look natural and to avoid having white lives over the face. If you did it right, you should get something like this so far:

Next step. Press “D” to set your foreground and background colors to black and white. Make a new layer on top of the other two and fill it with black. Go to Filter >> Render >> Clouds and apply the clouds effect. Set this layer’s opacity to about 50% and if you see that the result is not exactly as you see below (this could depend on your clouds layer or the lightness / darkness of your photo), try playing with settings, Overlay or Soft Color might work.

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Duplicate your clouds layer.

Go to Filter >> Noise >> Add Noise, and add noise as set below.

Now go to Filter >> Blur >> Motion Blur, and add this motion blur. This is similar to fake rain effect, only we will add little distance to the blur to create the illusion of snowflakes, rather than rain scan lines.

At this point, flaten the layer.

Now that your entire canvas consist from only one layer, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels… and apply these settings. We want to add a little contrast to the dark hue of the picture…

…and a bit of blue/green hue to highlight the coldness.

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That’s it! Here is your image. In a few simulate steps we took this girl from an autumn atmosphere to the Northern Pole. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

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