Airwalking Studios

Water Photoshop Effect
by Airwalker
Posted 2008-01-13
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This is one of my favorite effects to make with Photoshop. It creates realistic looking water, but only a body of water, not droplets. It can be used in background or you could actually do what Photoshop was meant for and use it for manipulating photos. Either way, here's how to do it...

First, make a separate canvas from the one you are working on. The size of it will depend on the picture you will put the water effect on. I made a 200 by 200 for this example.

	Select two colors. Normally, it would be dark blue and light blue, but you can choose different colors to suit the mood of your drawing.
	Render clouds. You may want to do it several times until you get a nice transition between the two colors. Filter>>Render>>Clouds
	Go to Filter>>Distort>>Ripple and configure it around 750% and choose large. Then go to Filter>>Distort>>Ocean Ripple and change the settings to Ripple Size 12 and Magnitude 12.

When you move it to its destination, make sure to bring down the transparency to about 50%, then shade it, add reflections, erase part of it... whatever your picture may need. Remember to do a skew/distort transformation to make the water look like it belongs to the surface.