From the course: SketchUp: Concept Drawings with Photoshop

Create water effects

From the course: SketchUp: Concept Drawings with Photoshop

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Create water effects

- [Narrator] Another part of the drawing that I want to pop is the water. Now right now this water looks a little bit dull, so let's go ahead and start by overlaying a water texture, and then we'll add some more reflections to give it a little bit more life. So I have an image here called Water Sparkling, and that's actually the same image that was used in this original sketch-up model. So I'm just going to go ahead and select all of this, copy it, and then let's go into our Photoshop file. Now I'm going to go into one of the lower layers here. I'm going to actually just go and select my beauty layer, and we're going to paste this just above it. So I'm going to go ahead and do a paste, and then again, just like we did with the reflections, I'm going to use my free transform to position this over where I want it to be. Now I don't have to get this perfect, 'cause again, we're going to cut out what we don't want using our color select, so I want this basically to have that same perspective. And you can also see that this is a lot brighter, so it's going to pop a little bit more. But we don't have it exactly where we want it, so let's go ahead and turn on our color select layer, and in this case I can just use my magic select tool to select this. Let's go down to that layer that we have for the water, and again, I'm going to do a select inverse and hit delete, and that basically deletes everything outside of that. So now I've got some water that looks pretty nice, so I can dial that up or down using opacity to make that water pop. Now the one thing about water is that it is also reflective, so I want to reflect something in this water. And in this case, these beams would make a very nice reflection, and that would be the natural reflection for this. So in order to do this, I simply need to copy my beauty layer. So I'm going to go ahead and select beauty, do edit, duplicate layer, and instead of beauty copy, let's just call this water reflect, Hit okay. Now I want this above the water here, and if you notice, this is actually just the same layer that we have, so we need to flip this over. Now again, I'm going to go ahead and select this layer, make sure I do a select all, and then do a free transform. So what I'm going to do here is just flip this over, so that way we get the reflection. So I'm basically just going to adjust this so that it all lines up, but it's also kind of skewed towards that pond. Something like that. Now, I'm going to hide this and then again, we can use our color select to select that area we want to keep. Make sure I select that layer, so that's what I want to keep. I'm going to select the inverse of that, and then go down to this water reflect layer. Let's go ahead and turn that on. And make sure we turn off our color select layer here so we can see what we're doing. So as you can see, using color select I've just selected the inside of the pond and reversed it so I have the outside of the pond. Once I hit delete, you can see that most of that image goes away and now I have a nice reflection. Now again, I can do similar to what I did before with the shadows here, and I can blur that reflection. Now typically the reflection on the water is going to be a little bit more blurry, so let's go ahead and use something like a Gaussian Blur, blur that a little bit. Something like that. And then we can turn down the opacity to get kind of a nice reflection. So now I've got layer two here is my water, so let's go ahead and name that. We'll call that water. This is the water reflection, and now I've got some water that looks a little bit more realistic in my scene.

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