Creating a reflection using layers and filters

At this point, the girl we placed into beach.psd is scaled to a more appropriate size and is in position at the edge of the water; however, she still looks like she’s floating in space. To make the girl look as though she belongs in the picture, we can create a reflection in the water at her feet. We can accomplish this using layers and filters.

Duplicating and distorting a layer

The first step in the process of making the reflection is to duplicate the girl on rock layer that we can turn into a reflection. After we copy the layer, we’ll use the Distort command to make the copied layer look more like a reflection. Finally, we’ll adjust the transparency of the layer to let some of the original color of the water show through the reflection.

As you create the reflection, keep the following things in mind:

• Reflections of vertical objects are always vertical to the observer but, depending on the angle of the camera, they may not look vertical in a snapshot. Therefore, when creating a reflection, make its angle the same as other reflections.
• If a reflective surface is undisturbed (for example, still water), its reflections are exactly the height of the reflected objects; however, if the surface is distorted and moving, perceived height of reflections may be slightly longer.
• Finally, unlike shadows, reflections on water move with the observer.

Let’s start creating the reflection.

The reflection should look similar to the following image at this point:

It's a good start, but the reflection still needs work. It looks too smooth and undisturbed, almost like she’s standing on a mirror and not in the water. This can be fixed by adding ripples to the reflection with a filter.

Using a filter to add ripples to the reflection

As seen previously, Photoshop offers a wide range of filters that we can apply to an image. Earlier on, we used the Lens Blur filter to blur the background of an image — here, we’ll make use of the Ripple filter to help make the reflection look more realistic.

We now have a ripple filter added to the reflection layer. What if we decide later on to make changes to the filter we added, though? We can do this by using a feature of Photoshop called Smart Filters. Smart Filters work by adding the filter as a sub-layer of an existing layer, making it so we can apply a filter without affecting any of the layers underneath the one we’re working on. Additionally, with Smart Filters, we can come back and edit the filter to adjust its appearance or hide it entirely if desired.

In order to use Smart Filters, we’ll need to make sure the layer we’re working with is a Smart Object. We can tell whether or not a layer is considered a Smart Object by looking at the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel:

The reflection layer is already a Smart Object, so the filter we applied to it is a Smart Filter and we can edit it if desired. Let's go ahead and change the filter we just added to make the reflection fit the image a little better. We'll do this by changing the amount of ripple applied to the reflection layer.

NOTE: To convert a layer into a Smart Object, select the layer you want to convert. Then, in the Menu bar, Click Layer, Point to Smart Object, Click Convert to Smart Object.

To learn more about Smart Objects, read the Adobe Help article Work with Smart Objects.

The finished reflection should look similar to the following image:

The reflection now looks more natural.

At this point, we've finished working with beach.psd — let's save our work, then see how to prepare the image for print and web use.