How to Create a Perfect Water Reflection in Photoshop 2022

Learn How to Create a Perfect Water Reflection in Photoshop. Create reflections and ripples from scratch. Composite a boat in water and make reflections and ripples in water.

Create a Perfect Water Reflection in Photoshop

How to create a perfect water reflection in Photoshop. In this video, I will show you how to make water reflections from scratch with realistic reflections and ripples. Going to show you a couple of examples of working with ripples. In this case, we’re going to work with a reflection and ripple in water. So I have a background here. I added a boat.

How to Add a Reflection with Ripples in Water.

I cut the boat out and my layer mask here and I created a smart object out of it. So now the first thing I’m going to do is we’re going to duplicate this layer here. My boat, layer going to duplicate that with command J. And I got rid of the layer mask of that duplicate right there. So I’m going to make a new smart object out of this layer.

I’m going to make this my reflection layer. I’m going to transform this. CMD+T and I want to flip it. I’m going to right click in my transform and say flip vertical hit my checkmark and with my move tool selected and holding the shift down. I’m going to bring this boat down to where it meets in the water right here. So now let’s make that boat look more like it belongs here in the water.

And let’s make that reflection look like it belongs to that boat. So I click on the reflection layer and I’m going to take the opacity down. Lets start at around 50%. Now I’m still on the reflection layer. And down here at the bottom of this reflection of the sail, we want to kind of make that blending a little bit kind of go away.

So I want to get my reflection layer, a layer mask. Then I’m going to hit G for the gradient tool and I’m going to use a linear gradient. And I set my foreground color to like a gray color and say, okay, so I’m using foreground to background color for my gradient. Hold my shift key and drop make that bottom of that kind of go away.

You see how that kind of fades there. And now we want to add some ripple to our reflection. Click on the reflection thumbnail, not on the layer mask and come up to filter, distort and ripple. And for size we want to try a medium and the amount bring it up to something around 400. And say, okay, now you see what that did.

It brought in some ripples into the reflection. Come over here to our reflection layer. You see that we have a smart filter called Ripple. And if we want to change that, just double click on the name and you can change the amount or you can change the size of ripple. You can play with that whatever is going to work for your image.

So now we’re going to blend in that reflection a little bit more. And if you notice that here there’s some ripples or little waves in the water and these dark areas are shadows because they’re facing us. So we’re not going to see that reflection in those darker areas. The lighter areas are facing the boat. The darker areas in the water are facing us.

So to take care of that, we’re going to double click on the reflection layer and that’s going to bring up a layer style. And we’re going to work with blend if down here. We’re going to work with the underlying layer. So we want the darker areas to show through. So if we bring over our blend if slider, you see how the darker areas are starting to come through.

Now, if I hold down alt/option, I can split this control and you see how that looks zoomed back out a little bit more and you see how this is starting to make our sail blend in a little bit more and look like a reflection. And you can adjust this to your taste, how much you want to see, but those dark areas are now coming through and you can also do this with any highlights.

If you see some of those, you want to preserve those too. And again, on the split, this you don’t want to say, okay, now the boat looks like it’s actually in the water. It has reflection and ripples in the reflection. And here’s before with no boat. Here’s the boat in the water. There’s the before and the after, with the reflection and the ripple and you can go back into the smart filter or the layer style and make changes.

How to Add a Reflection with Ripples from Scratch

In this example, we’re going to create our own reflection from scratch and we’re going to add our ripples. So first thing I want to do with this image is I want to give myself some more room up here in the sky area. I want to come up to my crop tool and up here at the top I’m going to have content, aware, checked and delete crop pixels unchecked.

And I’m just going to pull on this bar right here and give myself some room up here and a click on my checkmark because I’m going to want to move these houses closer to the top here because I want more room here on the bottom for my reflection. I’m going to duplicate that layer. Now I’m going to use my marquee tool to make a selection around the part of the image that is going to be above my reflection.

And I put this selection on some layer I’ll hit command+J. Now that selection is on its own layer. Now I want to flip this layer vertically. So I’m going to say command +T right click and say flip vertical click my checkmark. I’m going to change this into a smart object and rename it reflection. Now I’ll click on my Move tool, hold the shift key down and move my reflection down.

I can also position my layer below it so it is more close to the sky. Again, I’m holding the shift key and I’m moving up my layer, my reflection layer below, and you may need to position both the layers at the same time. So I hold down the shift key and with my move to selected. I’m moving both layers up at the same time.

So now that these houses are the reflection of each other, if you want, you could say you’re done. Now I suggest you look at a lot of photos that have reflections. There’s different kinds. There’s reflections where you see a still reflection no ripples below it, and there are reflections that are really distorted as far as the reflection and the ripples.

Let’s get some ripples in here with the reflection layer selected. I’m going to come up here to filter, blur and motion blur. I’m going to set the angle to 90 distance to 11 and say, okay, on the layer, if I drop this arrow down here, you can see that it is a smart filter. I can double click on Motion Blur and I can change angle or distance and say, okay. So now I’m going to show you two different ways to create ripples.

So we’re going to go to the same filter we did in the last example. I’m going to go to filter, Distort, Ripple. You can go back and forth and try a different size in amounts and try medium amount, 400 and say, okay and see, that is the effect. I can double click on Ripple, I can change it to large size, say, okay, so medium somewhere in the middle.

So for this image it’s more of a subtle ripple. And if you don’t like this effect, I have another one for you. And we’re going to create a ripple displacement map. Right now I’m going to disable this ripple filter to create our displacement map or our ripples. I’m going to come up here to file new. We want a new Photoshop document here and the size should be something that is more of a vertical document.

How to make a Ripple Displacement Map

So we want this document to be 200 width 330 height, 72 resolution RGB color black background orientation vertical and say create. We want to add some noise to this document. So come up to filter noise, add noise. I’m going to have my amount to maximum distribution uniform and monochromatic checked and say, okay, I want to add a blur to this document. Come up to

Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. I will make this 1.5 and say, okay. And now we want to go to our channels panel and click on the Red Channel and come up here filter stylize, emboss. And we set the angle to 90 degrees. Height to one and the amount to maximum, which in this case is 500, I’d say okay and do the same thing to the Green Channel and come up here to filter stylize emboss.

This time I’m changing the angle to 180. Everything else stays the same height one amount 500 and say, okay. I’m going to click back over to my layers panel and click on this lock right here. So it’s a layer and I want to change the perspective of this document and come up here to edit, transform and click on perspective. And I’m going to grab this bottom handle right here and I’m going to stretch this out a little bit smaller so I can stretch it out more and just stretch it out as much as you can.

And I’m going to say, okay, now we need to save this document as a Photoshop file, a PSD. Let’s save it on a computer, make sure that it is PSD. If this file is too big, it will want to save it as a PSB and the displacement map filter will not take anything but a PSD file. So now back to our image.

I had disabled the ripple filter that we used before and now I’m going to come up to filter, distort, displace. And this is where we’re going to bring in our displacement map file that we created. Going to start out with horizontal scale of ten and vertical scale of 40. Both of these values can be changed later, so it will change your ripple effect.

You can play around with these stretched to fit needs to be checked. Repeat edge pixels needs to be checked in check embed file data in smart object and say okay, and here is our displacement map file that we created and select that and say open and here is our ripple with the displacement map. I’ll disable this in enable the ripple that we first created it, see the difference and turn this displaced back on.

And if you want to change it, just double click on the displaced filter and you can change these values and make your ripple look different. I’m going to include the displacement map file that we created in the description and you can download that and use that in your project. Here is our original image of the houses. Now here are your houses with your reflection and your ripple.

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See the previous blog article here ➡️ Quick Way to Match Color in Photoshop 2022

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