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Tutorial #6 - Creating Reflections

When you are creating your own compositions from various photographs you often need to add either shadows or reflections. This tutorial will show you how to bring a new object into a waterfall scene and add a reflection into the water to make it more realistic.

Click on Patch to download both the images I have used in this tutorial to enable "hands-on"

::DOWNLOAD FILE::

When you see Patch, click on him to download the images used in the tutorials

Take a look at the picture opposite to see a typical image set up with a grid. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have already removed the background of the horse image and saved it in Photoshop's own format. You will see it only has one layer labelled "Horse".
1.	Make sure the Horse image is active (click on it if it isn't) and click on the small arrow on the top right of the Layers palette (if the palette is not visible press F7).
2.	From the dropdown menu select "Duplicate Layer". When the requestor appears change the name back to Horse, and then set the Destination to "waterfall.psd". This will duplicate our horse straight onto the waterfall image as a new floating layer.
3.	You will now find the "horse" layer in the middle of your waterfall image. What we need to do now is turn it around and resize it. Making sure the layer with the horse is active, select Transform from the Edit menu. Next choose the Flip Horizontal command. The horse changes direction.
4.	Press CTRL+T (or select Free Transform.. Scale from the Edit menu). Hold down the Shift button and reduce the horse in size. By keeping the Shift button held down the horse keeps its proportions. When you are happy with the new size press Enter.
5.	Press "V" to activate the Move tool and position the horse in the water so it is somewhere like the horse in my example on the next page.
6.	Now that we have placed the horse in the water we need to make a duplicate layer of it for the reflection. From the Layers palette drag the Layer of the horse onto the Create New Layer icon while holding down the ALT key. When you are given the option rename the new layer to "Horse Reflection".
7.	From the Edit menu, select Transform and then Flip Vertical. Press the "V" key to activate the Move tool and reposition the new layer. See my example to get a rough guide. To adjust the position slightly, use your cursor keys - the layer will move 1 pixel at a time. We now need to remove the parts of the horse that are on the rock at the bottom of the image. To do this we will use the Layer Mask option. This way if we make a mistake or are not happy with the results we can always paint the horse back in. From the Layers palette click on the first icon - Add Layer Mask. Press the "D" key to return the colour palette back to its default settings. Press "B" to activate the Brush tool and select a small-medium brush from the Brush palette. Now, with Black as the Foreground colour we can effectively Erase the parts of the horse we don't want. If we make a mistake press the "X" key to swap the Foreground and Background colours around. Now we can paint the horse back in… in other words Erase the Eraser!
8.	Carefully remove the horse by using the Brush on the rocks. Remember you can undo any mistakes. When the parts of the horse we don't need are gone, get the Remove Layer Mask option from the Layers menu. Click on Apply to accept our new work.
9.	Create a Layer Mask for the original horse and repeat the above process - you need to remove the feet to give the impression the horse is standing in the water.
10.	You will now need to reposition the horse again. Press the "V" key to activate the Move tool and using your cursor keys nudge the horse down slightly until it roughly matches up with its reflection.
11.	Select the whole image by either pressing CTRL+A or choosing the Select All command from the Select menu. From the Image menu, choose the Crop command - this will remove any parts of the image currently outside of our picture.
12.	With the Horse Reflection layer active select the Filter menu and choose Distort and then ZIGZAG. Enter these values in the boxes:- Amount=58, Ridges=8, Style=Out from Centre. Click OK to apply our settings.
13.	Finally to make the appearance of the Reflection layer more realistic adjust the opacity of the layer. Enter a value between 55-68%. The reflection fades out slightly giving us our reflection.