new earth online

Water takes up about 70% of the Earth's surface - that's a lot of water, but just because there's a lot of it doesn't mean it should take a lot of time to draw it in Photoshop. This covers basic water effects in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Many people who know me know I'm a big fan of StarGate - mostly because of it's views on mythology and ancient history. This has led me to think about drawing a StarGate in Photoshop, and what a better place to start that with the water effect. Water is not smooth, go outside and look at the nearest body of water you can find. Water is effected by the environment - the more wind there is, the more ripples you are likely to see in it, just as it's opacity is dependant on the quality and depth of it (for example a pond that's been unsettled might be cloudy from soil). I thought for this tutorial we could start with something simple - some shallow water over some a soil floor. To start with I went to the stock.xchng to get a texture for the floor.

Once you've opened up the image in photoshop, start off my making a new layer (Ctrl-Shift-N on PC, or Cmd-Shift-N on Mac). This new layer will be the start of our water effect. Now, press D to set your colours back to the default, and make sure Black is your current foreground colour. Using the Fill tool, colour the new layer black. The reason for doing this is because our next task is to use a Difference Cloud render and this requires something to work with; so a black layer is as good as anything. To apply the difference cloud, goto Filter, Render, Difference Cloud. You can change this pattern slightly be reapplying the filter one or more times by going to the Filter menu and choosing "Last Filter" or by pressing Ctrl-F (Cmd-F on Mac) on your keyboard. This will give us something like the following image.

The next step is to make the texture look a little more like a liquid, and to do that we shall apply another filter: Chrome. To apply this filter goto Filter, then Sketch, then Chrome, and click Ok.

Great, still doesn't look like water, unless it's been coated in oil, but we're getting there. The next step is to add a bit of colour, in my example I have used a light blue (#6699cc). Now to apply it you will need to create a new layer and fill it with your newly selected blue. Once you have done this fiddle with the opacity level on the colour and water layers so that the water is the right blue, and the ground shows through by just the right ammount.

It might not be the prettiest of water effects, though it is a nice quick way to achieve something that resembles water. The first of the two images above is also about right to use for a Star Gate. Perfect. Sometime in the future I will right a tutorial for those that want a little more advanced effects, such as that seen in the tutorial graphic at the top.