This is a very very very old tutorial that i wrote back in 2006(when i owned the TwistedGFX forum). I found it on my old computer, so i decided to post it(i modified a few things to lower the difficulty level).

As i said in a previous post i started my designer career as a GFX artist, i got 50-100 outwar points for an animated profile picture back then(my outwar name was SoulC4tch3r), so i wrote a tutorial of how to make animated rain.

Step 1:
Grab any picture, and resize/crop it to fit your needs. I resized and cropped this robot wallpaper to look good as a 250×250px outwar profile picture.

Step 2:
open up the image in photoshop, when done press: CTRL+SHIFT+N to create a new layer, after this press SHIFT+F5 to fill the layer with black color( belnding mode: normal ; opacity 100%)

Step 3:
Here comes the little harder part . Go to Filter menu->Noise->Add noise; there set amount between 80->87%; distribution-> gaussian; enable Monochromatic mode.

Step 4:
After you are done go to Filter->Blur->Motion blur; there you can adjust the rain’s lenght. The bigger the value the bigger the rain strokes will be. Remember to set the angle in values between +/-28 and +/-50(depending on the desired alignment of the rain)

Step 5:
Now go to layers box and set overlay mode to your rain effect layer. To adjust it a little you can use Soft Light.

Step 6:

at step 6 repeat all the steps from step 2 to step 5, the only thing you need to change is the angle at motion blur, for example if you selected -31 as i did select -33 now.

Step 7:
now press CTRL+SHIFT+M to transfer the image in Imageready so you can do the animation part also. You can do it in photoshop also by opening the animation box)

Step 8:
Open up the animation box : Window -> Animation
a small box should appear. Now click on the button that is circled once and duplicate the frame

Step 9:
Now that you have 2 frames associate one frame with 1 layer and other with 2nd layer(see bellow)

Step 10:
If you made it to this step congratulations! You should now have a picture with rain on it. Make sure to save the file in a .gif format with no dither.

Result:

Of course you can vary the effects and add extras to them like lightning, brightness modification, clearing th rain from the character’s body. Don’t be scared! Photoshop is your friend!