Hey everybody for my 3rd design assignment I have animated this cover  of one of my favorite mangas/animes D. Gray-Man (I apologize for the clown the author has a very weird thing for clowns) and now I’m going to teach you how to make this snowy effect in Photoshop CS5 using my example here:

1. The first step of course is to choose a picture, once you have made your selection open it in Photoshop.
2. Next you want to make sure the animation switch is toggled on this allows you to see the frames of your animation as you progress, you can find this option in the “Windows” drop down menu:
3. Now in the animation frame task bar I have an option on that creates new layers as I create new frames, this isn’t really necessary but I think it speeds things up a little (you also may want to delete the very first frame that Photoshop creates for you as it seems a bit misplaced with the snow fall effect):
4. Now lets start making the snow, first create a new frame (which in turn will also make a new layer) and with the paint bucket tool color the whole new layer black blocking out your picture temporarily. Then we go to the drop down menu “Filter” and look for the option noise, you want to add noise to the following specifications shown below:
5. Your picture should now look like a speckled mess but don’t worry well fix that. Next we go to the “Filter” menu again this time selecting blur and then Gaussian blur following these specifications:
6. For the next step, were going to adjust the levels using the command “CTRL + L” which should open up a new dialogue box. Use these specifications: 
7. See now our flakes are looking a little more uniform, but you’re probably wondering how this black splotch is involved with your picture. Well now were going to make it transparent so the snowy effect will actually go over our picture. To do this go to the layers menu on the side bar and look for the drop down menu labeled normal, instead we are going to shift the setting to screen which should make our picture look like this:
8. Notice the tiny white spots over the picture? Well now we need to repeat these steps adding more frames and layers with all the specifications as above except this time you should increase the noise amount by +1 per frame (I actually did +.5 per frame but only to lengthen it up a bit). You can continue adding frames up to any digit you want, I continued until 73% noise leaving me with this many frames playing with the times indicated:

Final product once again: