One of the great advantages of Adobe Photoshop CS4 is the power it gives you to manipulate photos. Here is a very popular topic in photography manipulation and that is the reflection. The ability to make it look like your picture is being reflected as if it were looking in a mirror or on a shiny desktop. Here is a simple tutorial to create a basic reflection of an image.
- Launch photoship and open up the image you want to work with for this tutorial.
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Step 2
NOTE: Don’t forget to unlock the layer by double clicking on it and clicking ok on the layer window that appears.
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Step 3
Duplicate the layer by pressing the “CTRL” and “J” keys on your keyboard at the same time. You will notice you will have a new layer in your layers panel called {layer name}” Copy” where {layer name} is the layer name you gave it when you unlocked the original image. I renamed my new layer “reflection” and the original image “initial picture”.
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Step 4
We now need to add space to our canvas to give our new reflection layer a place to live. In order to increase the canvas size, select “Image” from the menu at the top and then select “canvas size” from the submenu.
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Step 5
When the canvass size window appears you will see a box labeled height in the “New Size” area. Take the current height and double it. That will give you plenty of room for your reflection.
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Step 6
You will notice that it has put both your initial image layer and your reflection layer in the center of the canvas. What we need is for both of them to be at the top, therefore with our move tool we drag the images one at a time to the top of the canvas. First get the move tool from the tools panel then select a layer, finally move the image to the top. Switch layers and repeat. Both layers should have their images at the top of the canvass.
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Step 7
Hide the initial image layer so we can work exclusively with the reflection layer. To do this, click the icon that looks like an eyeball next to the initial image layer on the layers panel.
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Step 8
Now we need to flip our reflection image. Press the “CTRL” and “T” keys on your keyboard to call the “free transform tool”. You will notice it puts a box with small sqaures around your image. Click on the top center square and drag the image down to the bottom of your canvas. Your reflection image should look like the picture with this step.
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Step 9
Add a layer mask to your reflection layer. To do this select “Layer” from the main menu, then select “Layer Mask” from the submenu, then select “Hide All” from the third menu that appears, as shown in the picture. NOTE: Your image may disappear. Do not panic, it is still there, and will appear after you apply the gradient in the following steps.
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Step 10
Add a gradient to our reflection layer with the layer mask. press “G” on your keyboard to select the gradient tool. Make sure you have black and white selected as the color and linear as the tool as shown in the picture associated with this step.
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Step 11
Your cursor should be a tiny cross. Starting at the bottom of your image, press and hold the shift key then click in the center-bottom and drag the line to the center top to create the gradient. When done, depending on how high up you drug the gradient, your picture should look similar to the one associated with this step.
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Step 12
Add a new layer and rename it “fill”. The drag it to the bottom of your layer list on your layers panel as shown in the picture.
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Step 13
Lets fill in our fill layer by select “Edit” from the main menu and then selecting “fill” from the submenu.
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Step 14
When the fill window appears, choose the color you wish to fill the background with. For my example I chose black. Now show all of your layers at once by making sure the eye ball icon is shown and your reflection picture is complete.
