reflection tutorials

[jaz]

While on vacation, I took a nice picture of a pelican in the water at sunset. I wanted to play around with it and so I extracted the pelican and the rock he was standing on and attempted to make a reflection and water using some tutorials I had in various books. Unfortunately, the ocean ripple effect doesn't work too good high dpi and large image settings so I was not as successful as I wanted.

Additionally, the transition from rock to water was not very good in my image. I'd appreciate hearing from folks who have done this and can give me some pointers...

http://www.jackzucker.com/Caribbean/reflection2.jpg

[T Paul]

Here are a couple of good tutorials on creating reflections & water in PhotoShop:

Reflections

Creating Water Effetcs & Reflections

Using the liquify command
Adobe Tut

Water Texture

These should get you started!

~T

[jaz]

Thanks T...

Several of those tutorials use the radial blur...I don't like the radial blur for my purposes. It looks like water viewed from above as if you're floating a few feet above it. I'm looking for a slightly different perspective as if you are viewing it from a shoreline...The ocean ripple actually works very well on the small files...

[T Paul]

The second link's tutorial created a water view using the ocean ripple from the persepctive I think you want. Seems like if you created it at a high resolution that it should work for large files. Just a thought.

Also here is one more tut
Compositing Water Effetcs

~T

[jaz]

Thanks...That uses ocean ripple which doesn't seem to work well on large image sizes...

[T Paul]

I tried the second tutorial using your image and this is what I came up with...

I think you will just have to experiment with settings and perhaps make your water image twice as large as you need it and reduce it to improve it's quality.

Of course if you are interested in software you might consider Digital Element's Aurora 1.1. You can check it out here

~T

[jaz]

Originally posted by T Paul
I tried the second tutorial using your image and this is what I came up with...

I think you will just have to experiment with settings and perhaps make your water image twice as large as you need it and reduce it to improve it's quality.~T

Your image looks good. In my testing, if I started with a 1024x768 image and created the ocean using Ocean Ripple, I could then resize it and it looked ok but going the other way, it did not look very good...The filter's definitely biased towards smaller scaling...

[Blacknight]

If the HARD way doesn't work for you, why not try Flaming Pear's Flood filter, and let IT do the work.

[Stephen M]

A quick addition, I have found that a vertical motion blur and blend modes like darken/multiply/hard light etc may help when it comes to blending a false reflection into water, in addition to the other methods.

Stephen Marsh.

[jaz]

Originally posted by Blacknight
If the HARD way doesn't work for you, why not try Flaming Pear's Flood filter, and let IT do the work.

It seems to have a problem with large areas. It gets very splotchy...Oh well - Back to the drawing board...

(See this post: http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/sho...&threadid=4691)

[jaz]

Here's a variation done with liquify and reduced opacity

[T Paul]

I like this reflection. Very nice work with the liquify command.

~T