Choose an Inner bevel with a high Soften value to avoid hard edges. Choose Layer > Layer Style > Bevel and Emboss, or select it from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Layers panel. You’ll now have just the gray water on a transparent background. Choose a mid-gray from the Swatches panel, and press Alt/Option-backspace to fill the selection with gray. Hide this layer and make another new layer, calling it “Water” so you can find it again easily. Press Q again to exit QuickMask, and you’ll see the “marching ants” selection edges on your plain white layer. But you’re still in QuickMask mode, and you need to turn this into a proper selection so you can work with it. Drag the black slider to the right, and the white slider to the left, until they just (or very nearly) touch the edges of the gray slider right in the middle.īy dragging these sliders, you lose all the fuzziness from the edges. There are three sliders beneath the Input Levels histogram. Open the Levels dialog (Images > Adjustments > Levels). Press Q to enter QuickMask mode, and you’ll see the fuzzy water in white against a red background. Hold Ctrl (Windows)/Command (Mac) and click on the thumbnail of the blurred water layer in the Layers Panel to load it as a selection. Make a new layer, filled with white, above the water layer. Use a blur setting just large enough that no small bumps and lumps are visible. I used a radius of 10 pixels, but the amount you choose depends on the size of the rough edges. Use Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to soften the water droplet edges. In real life, water would have much smoother edges. As you can see, the hard-edged brush you used means that the edges of the water are somewhat ragged and lumpy. Vary the size of the brush to make it easier to paint both small droplets and larger bodies of water. Paint your water on it in a mid-tone gray using a hard-edged brush. Make a new layer, then switch to the Brush tool. For a starting image, create some text on a dotted background. Water displacement is an effect that can be seen much more clearly on a graphic rather than a photographic image. This means you can move around pixels to create refraction effects, such as the view through water droplets–and that’s the effect we’re going to create here. Displacement maps are one of the least frequently used features in Photoshop, but they provide a function that’s found nowhere else in the program: the ability to distort images based on the brightness values in a second image.
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