Definition of frustrating: trying to re create sin city rain and having to trawl through a bunch of useless tutorials that just say the same thing over and over again! Never fear loyal readers, I have perfected the perfect sin city rain effect.

Here’s the first lot of rain that I came up with using all the tutorials that I found online:

Basically the formula for this rain is as follows:

1. New layer> Fill 50% grey
2. Filter>Add Noise>Add Noise, Amount 400%, Gaussian, monochrome
3. Transform: 500% with the little link button pressed.
4. Filter>Blur>Motion Blur, angle 75, distance approx 400 (depending on size of image)
5. Set the layer on screen, then duplicate and mask out the offending rain.

As you can see its pretty uniform rain, not very exciting and not at all like the rain that you see in the posters. The lines aren’t thick enough and it looks pretty boring

Here’s the rain that I came up with:

It all came to help with these two brushes that I came up with:

Rain Brushes (9.0 KiB)

Basically all I did to come up with this effect was the following:

1. Two layers with rain underneath the person, first on set at 25% opacity, the top one at 50% opacity to create a look of depth to the image.
2. Then another layer at the top of the image, set at 100% opacity. Just mask out any rain that doesn’t belong.
3. A new layer with the splash II brush across the shoulders and the gun.

Yay all done. Its so much easier than messing around with noise and motion blur etc. You can also change the size of the brush depending on how you want the rain to look, direction etc.

To finish the image off you can add some authentic sin city text and a quote from the movie that will fit in with the person:

The sin city font was done in colour: #ff0000, rotated with layer style>Drop Shadow, Angle: 141, Distance: 21px, spread 4%, size: 0px.

P. S. You can’t see the layer style in this pic unless you move it over to an area that has white in it.

The quote  was done with a shape layer, with the colour set to white and a layer style>Stroke, size: 10px, position:inside, colour black.

Find the sin city font here: Dafont and the writing font here: Blambot

So easy once you know how Enjoy recreating your sin city posters!