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Re-creating a dramatic stormy day, not unlike a scene from a scary movie, is trickier than it seems. Using Photoshop to do it means you have tons of sophisticated tools at your disposal, so which ones and what techniques can best be applied to this particular composition? It too often happens that the artist over uses PS filters, or doesn't quite know which tools are best suited for the task. There's rain, dramatic clouds, and colours which tend to cast a blueish-gray hue over everything. These are subtle nuances, yet they're so very important to the drama, the emotion of the photograph.In the first picture you get to see the actual source file I worked on. Notice the composition isn't very dynamic, the whole thing comes across like a postcard.

The second image is the re-created scene. Notice the colours, contrasts, composition, and overall composite changes made. They are all there to enhance the mood of mystery; there's something happening in that house. Maybe something malicious.

How it was done:

Applied selections to remove sky, adjusted color, and levels to darken up the image.

I created several layers of the lighthouse and ground and applied a crosshatch filter to one, a motion blur to another and set the opacity so that all three (the original, and adjusted layers) blend effortlessly together for a realistic effect. For the rain I created a new Photoshop document and drew a horizontal line.I then defined it as a new brush selection.I used my newly-created "rain" brush to pepper the scene with rain (new layer). I then created a new rain layer and made the brush diameter smaller by half to give the illusion of different sized droplets. I created a third rain layer and motion blurred in on the same angle as the rain drop to give the added illusion of movement (crashing rain). I darkened the whole scene, and then added a lighting effect. The first was set to omni with a slight yellow hue to give that rainy feeling. The second lighting effect was set to directional with a slight blue tint to complete the rainy day effect.