Tutorial: Water and Waves

By Dirk Metzmacher

Summertime and swimming pools: Hop into the blue and enjoy total refreshment. Not everyone can afford his own pool, but Photoshop offers a way to have a bit of bathing fun for free. For that we use the Clouds filter, which is one of few filters that generate a random result.

Water surface

1. From clouds to water

The water surface in a swimming pool catches the sun in numerous reflections. The Clouds filter as one of the few random generators offers the easiest way to get natural structures. This is one of those cases. Press D on the keyboard to reset the foreground and background color to standard black and white.

Now everything is prepared for our Cloud filter. There’s still one problem though: The clouds’ size cannot be adjusted. For smaller structures this means that you’ll need a larger document in order to scale it down later on. So create a new 1900 x 1200 px document, then select Filter > Render > Clouds from the menu.

2. Chrome

The Sketch > Chrome filter generates our water structure. Details should be on a low setting, Smoothness on a very high setting.

3. Water Color

Water is blue, which is why we now colorize our structure. Click on Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation in the menu and check “Colorize�. Give Saturation a value of about 50, and 10 for Lightness. For “Hue� you can decide: If you want a turquoise blue, put the slider at 190. For azure/sky-blue 220 would be just right. And 235 gives you a very strong, saturated blue.

4. Familiar perspective

Seen from a bird’s eye view, water is always distorted perspectively. Edit > Transform > Perspective lets you do just that. Beforehand you should duplicate the layer via Layer > New > Layer via Copy or Ctrl+J. Better safe than sorry.

Zoom out with the magnifying glass. Now you can easily position and distort the texture. See the photographer’s shadow? I created a new layer for it, selected an appropriate shape with the Polygon Lasso tool, filled it with the color #227788 (RGB 34, 119, 136), and then I reduced the layer opacity.

Tip: In order to get a somewhat softer variation, you can use the Artistic > Plastic Wrap filter in addition to the Chrome filter above. The settings here are Highlight Strength 16, Details 4 and Smoothness 12.

Circular waves

1. Radial

If you throw a stone into water, the waves propagate in a circular pattern. To achieve this effect, use Filter > Blur > Radial Blur in addition to the Clouds filter, and use the settings Amount 40, Method “Spin� and Quality “Best�.

2. Waves

A Gaussian Blur with a radius of four pixels lets our clouds become nicely blurred. Now apply the Sketch > Bas Relief filter with Detail 14 and Smoothness 3, then you can continue with the Chrome filter as described above.

Soft waves

1. Water

In order to get very soft waves, create a new layer above the water layer and fill it with #66ccdd (RGB 102, 204, 221). Reduce the layer opacity according to your likes.

2. Combination

The combination with an isolated image of a pool beauty shows you how even artificially created water textures can have a very realistic impact.