Reflecting My Words (On Water)
This post is long overdue, but better late than never. In this session, we learnt about smart objects, as well as how to create water reflections using Transform and Filters and who knows what else.
Even though Digital Image Manipulation mostly deals with Photoshop, we'll need Illustrator for the first part of this session. Set up your artboard. Use the Type tool to write "Danau Maninjau".
Leave that Illustrator be, and let's move on to Photoshop. Look at this lovely picture of a lake and some grass and a pathway and a table and chairs and mountains and clouds and a faraway human settlement. Oh, and a fence thingy. The fence is important. Don't fall off. The water won't reflect your dead body.
Since we're going to write in white, make the background black.
You can go to File > Place Linked... Hide the background, and you'll get something like this:
Since we're going to create reflections, copy the text so now there are two texts in the picture. Then go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical.
This is what you'll get (when you meeessss with uuuuusssss~):
Radiohead references aside, go to Filter > Gaussian Blur. Because reflections are blurry, unless the water is really still or photoshopped. Come to think of it, we're photoshopping something to look imperfect. This, my friends, deserves to be hashtag of the day.
Also, water reflections are ripply. Not sure if that's a real adjective but no red wavy lines appeared below it when I typed that, so I guess it is a real word.
When applying masks, you can use the Brush tool to apply/erase the areas you want to apply the masks to. The white Brush applies, and the black Brush takes away.
This is what you get when you don't remove the black background:
The final result. It looks good. Notice the shitload of layers on the right. Beauty is pain, people.
So what did we learn today? One, reflections are imperfect, perfectly so. Two, the whole white brush/black brush thing could possibly spark an internet war on racism in a few years, leading to a petition to make Adobe change these settings. I'm envisioning a blue/black or white/gold brush setting. Three, layers are important, because you want to be flexible when working. Always make everything redeemable.
And that, my friends, is the first real advice I've ever given you in the history of this blog.