Welcome back! For the three tutorial’s in today’s post, we’re again creating water with Steve Caplin’s How to Cheat in Photshop, 6th ed. But, unlike last week, these tutorials deal with water in other forms.
Snow and Icicles
As many winter holiday images are created months in advance, long before wintry scenes ca be photographed, our first tutorial has many work applications. It turns out creating snow isn’t hard, but it is a lot easier when using a graphics pen tablet drawing device than with a mouse. The first time I ran through this tutorial I didn’t have a graphics pen tablet and the results weren’t as convincing. The image on the right was re-created using the graphics tablet and, I must say, it was ever so much easier to do.
To create the winter illusion, the snow began as a very light grey shape drawn on a new layer. Then the Dodge and Burn Tools were used to give the snow some shadows and highlights.
The icicles also started out on a new layer as grey shapes, which also received a Dodge and Burn treatment. Then the Plastic Wrap filter was applied and the layer mode changed to hard light.
The snow bank creeping up the wall was created using a very low opacity brush set to Dissolve and then applying white paint on another new layer. Next Gaussian Blur was used to soften this layer.
Finally, curves adjustment layers were used to make the wall bluer and give the windows that warm glow.
Making it Rain
I love rainy days, which means I loved completing this tutorial. Recently, I used this same technique for a Friday Challenge submission, but that image will have to wait for a future blog post. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied with the image pair below.
For this transformation, it helped that the original image was photographed on an overcast day. Changing an image of a sunny day to a rainy one is much more challenging as there are hard shadows to remove.
As with the previous tutorials covering reflections in water, the background layer couldn’t just be flipped vertically to create the reflective puddle on the sidewalk and in the street. Instead, the buildings had to be sheared to match the perspective. The reflection layer was then masked so that the sidewalk would look damp and the street would have puddles. Next, the Ocean Ripple filter and the ZigZag filter made the reflection layer look more like water.
To produce the rain, a new layer set to Hard Light Mode was created and filled with a mid-grey. To make the texture of the rain, Gausian Noise was used and then the Motion Blur filter was added to develop the wind-driven look.
The mist was created using the clouds filter on a new layer and then masked back so the mist appears only at the top of the image.
Finally, the lights were turned on in a couple of the windows using a Curves Adjustment Layer, resulting in a realistic effect.
A Cool Glass of Water
Since I originally completed this tutorial using a mouse, I planned to redo it using my graphics pen tablet device and then show only that completed image. But, I decided to let you see how much less convincing the results are with a mouse as seen in the middle image below:
Similar to previous water techniques, the ice started out as grey shapes on a new layer. Again the Dodge and Burn Tools were used to create the shadows, with Highlights and the Plastic Wrap Filter giving the ice a shiny surface. To make the ice look semi-transparent, the ice layer mode was changed to Hard Light.
The bubbles were created on a new layer with a brush that had it’s spacing set very high. To make the resulting dots look more 3D, the Emboss effect in the Layers Styles was applied. Then, the bubbles layer mode was changed to hard light.
Caplin apparently didn’t like the brown tint in the glass of the original photo, so he instructed his readers to make it bluer. The shadow behind the glass was created by duplicating all the glass and contents layers, merging them and shearing them. Finally, the shadow was faded by using a gradient on a layer mask.
Still, I’m sure you’ll agree the middle image’s result is less convincing than the image on the right, where the graphics pen tablet device was employed.
Next: Shiny Surfaces – Part 4