I would like to try some photo composites based on marine life, coral and /or shells but need a technique for producing realistic looking sea floors. I am looking for a sandy texture, wavy surface and realistic color gradients. I have made a few attempts at this myself but they all look pretty lame. I assume somebody has tried this before and I would be very interested in some pointers to get me moving in the right direction.

I am currently using Photoshop 6.01 but will be upgrading to 7.0 in the next couple of weeks.

thanks for your time and consideration.

Well let's see if you are about to get PhotoShop 7.0 it has a great plug-in feature called Pattern Maker. You can use this plug-in to create realistic or abstract patterns such as grass, rocks, and sand simply by selecting a section of an image and saving the newly created pattern to your pattern library. So if you have any underwater photos you may be able to create some nice patterns for your pattern stamp tool such as sand, seaweed, coral and so on.

Click here (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/movie_nf4.html) to view the quicktime pattern maker movie. This clip will give you a quick tutorial on using the pattern maker feature.

~T

I found a great tutorial for creating an undersea scene, but it's for Painter. Of course, you might be able to follow along and recreate something similar in Photoshop.

View the tutorial here (http://www.rapartz.com/tutorials/underwater/under1.htm)

~T