Archive for November 21st, 2005

Creating A Water Drop Effect
Filed under Photoshop Tutorials - Head Nerd @ November 21st, 2005
Making a water drop
Open the image where you want to add the water drop. Mine is this:
Make a droplet-shaped selection using the Elliptical Marquee Tool. You can rotate your selection with Select > Transform Selection if you need a selection at an angle.
Right click on the selection and choose “Layer via copy”.
Select the new layer in the layers palette, hold CTRL and click on the droplet layer again to reselect the

elliptical shape. Once you have done this, run Filter > Distort > Spherize, and play with the setting until it looks good. Essentially, this filter recreates the underlying optical distortion of the water droplet.
Double click on the water drop layer to bring the Layer style dialogue. Now check the Drop shadow and play with the values as I did. My values are not fixed, as it depends on what photo do you take, resolution, angle, light source, etc.
Without pressing the OK button, go to the Inner Shadow section and enter the settings you like, but please note mine. Please note that the angle of the effects should be changed to reflect the position of the light source in your picture.
If you still have a selection active, lose it. Then select the Blur Tool with a medium-sized brush set to 50% strength, and blur the bottom left edges of the droplet. Real water droplets, of course, do not have sharp edges.
Hold CTRL and click the droplet layer again to form a selection around the water droplet. Create a new transparent layer on top of all the others and make it active. Use the linear white-to-translucent gradient, and drag the cursor diagonally inside the droplet to create a simple
gradient like in my example.
Choose Edit > Transform > Scale from the main menu and reduce the height and width to 80% of their original size. Set the layer opacity to 80%. Now you have a water drop.

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Magnifying Glass Effect
Filed under Photoshop Tutorials - Head Nerd @ November 21st, 2005
Applying a loupe effect
Create a new document, 1000×1000 pixels, no background.
Create a new layer. Using the eliptical marquee tool, make a perfect round selection and fill it with white. Position it like in my example:
With the selection still active, go to Select>Modify>Contract. I contracted with 10 pixels then I deleted it.
Now using the Linear gradient tool, I applied a Black-to-white gradient. You can see the example:
Now make a new layer. On it, make a circular selection just inside the gradient circle and repeat the procedure above, but this time change gradient to reverse. Your object should be like this:
Now let’s make the handle. On a new layer using the rectangular marquee tool, make it and position it like in the example:
Double click on the handle layer to bring up the Layer style dialogue. Mark the Gradient overlay and choose a gradient like in the example. Your image should look like this:
Hit CTRL+T (Command+T on Mac) to enter free transform mode and choose “Perspective”. From the upper right corner, drag it a little to make that portion bigger. Your handle should look like this: Position the handle layer under the loupe layer.
Select all three layers, right click and choose Group into new smart object. We finished the loupe. Now let’s get to the second part.
Open the image where you want to apply the loupe effect. Here is mine:
Drag the loupe in your image (now it is a smart object). Stretch it and rotate it until you are satisfied and the loupe covers the area you want.
Make a circular selection just inside the loupe, right click on the selection and choose Layer via copy.
Now CTRL+click on the newly created layer to bring back the selection. Go to Filter>Distort> Spherize and choose 100. Now Go again to spherize and reapply the filter but only with a 50 value.
Put the layer with the loupe in Hard Light mode. This is the final image:

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