Rain, rain ! who doesn't love rain ? Do you want to create an artificial rain effect on your pics ? Its very easy, only 1 object is needed , and it makes use of standard fireworks live filters., you need to have the noise filter in order to complete the tutorial ( fxmx2004 and above). To download the source file that was used, click here

1.) First we need a picture, any picture would do, ( it works best if the picture is taken outdoors, you can see the sky, clouds, mountains or etc.) On this tutorial . we will use the sample picture of windows xp , blue hills. height 154 and width 206

2.) Second , we need to make a rectangle ( black background color ) using the rectangle tool , we scale the size depending on the picture we are going to use, in this case, a 206 x 154 rectangle. Then on the properties panel we go to Filters , Noise , Add noise, here i used 19 for the amount.

3.) 3.) And lastly , we add another live filter for our rectangle. Select Blur , Motion Blur. Motion Blur Settings , Angle 300 , Distance 84. Select the rectangle , the change the layer mode from Normal to Negation. And there you go , you just made artificial rain !.

Well, that was so easy right ? You still feel , you need to add more rain ? Just duplicate the rectangle and there you go. You could also adjust the duplicated rectangle to the right or left , top or down a bit if you choose too. And you can duplicate more " rain " rectangles as you wish. Below you will see the difference between adding 2 rain rectangles vs. 4 rain rectangles.

Note : if you feel the artificial rain rectangle is overlapping your picture , just convert it to a bitmap and crop the corners , this would convert it into a flattened image, change the layer mode again from normal to negation. The duplicated rectangles needs to be moved around to create variety , just see the position when you download this .png. You could change the direction of the rain on the motion blur filter.