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Add Water Reflection using Photoshop

Last week I was struggling to retouch one of the images. I knew I could do something great to it but I didn’t know what. Then suddenly an idea popped up in my mind about adding water reflection using Photoshop. There was no water present near that area. I read a few tutorials regarding adding water reflection but none of them was appealing. Then I thought why not use my own mind to create one. Fortunately, I was able to achieve what I wanted and now I am sharing that trick with you.

So let’s begin.

Step 1

The first thing that we need to do is to increase the canvas size. You definitely want to create some space to show the reflection.

Go to Image>Canvas Size or press Ctrl+Alt+C/Cmd+Opt+C.

Change the method to “Percent” that is encircled with Red color. Increase the height to 200. This will increase the height to 200% of the original height. In other words, it will make the image twice in hight.

Now one important thing here is that you need the anchor to place downwards. This is encircled with Yellow color. This tells Photoshop to increase the height in the downward direction only.

1

If done correctly, your image should look like the one shown below.

2 Now grab Rectangular Marquee tool from the tool panel or by pressing Shift+M, and select the are that you want to show in the reflection.

3press Ctrl+J/Cmd+J to duplicate the select area. You can confirm this by opening your layer panel (F7).

4

Step 2

Make sure the duplicated layer is activated. Now we are going to flip the duplicate layer. Go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertically.

Grab the Move Tool from the tool panel or press V. Drag the flipped image to the bottom.

5

Now find a nice image of water reflection. Open it on Photoshop and press Ctrl+A/Cmd+A. We are going to use below image as water reflection. Now press Ctrl+C/Cmd+C to copy the image.

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STEP 3

Now go back to the original image. We are going to paste the image of water now. To paste, press Ctrl+V/Cmd+V.

7

The image of the water is not aligned. Grab the Move Tool from the tool panel and shift the image to the bottom.

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Go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All. This should give you a nice white rectangular box near the layer in your layer panel.

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Press D and then X to make black as your foreground color and white as your background. Grab the Gradient tool from the tool panel or by pressing Shift+G again and again until it comes.

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STEP 4

Create a nice gradient as shown below.

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Your image should look like this.

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Reduce the opacity of the water to 87%.

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STEP 5

Now the main problem is the line where the water meets the land.

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To fix this, we are going to add an inner shadow. Go to Layer>New Layer Style>Inner Shadow. Tweak the settings as shown below. Note that the distance in pixels independent on your image size. This image I am working on is 4182 pixels wide and 5082 pixels high.

15

Now activate the layer that contains the flipped background.

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Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Enter the radius according to your requirement.

And we are good to go.17

And we are done here. Don’t forget to check out the recommended tutorials below.

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