Photoshop: Water Textures

Requirements: Adobe Photoshop 7

You can proably do this with older version of photoshop but if you don't have them or want the new version, you can download a 30 day trail here.

Introduction

In this article I'm going to show you how to create a water texture in Photoshop. Although Macromedia Fireworks has some built in textures to do this, the textures you can create in Photoshop look far more realistic and is more customizable. For more infromation on image editing see my last column.

I will also make it seemless so you can tile it on your web page, background, etc as wallpaper and it won't show the lines where the image repeats.

step by step

1. The first thing to do is to create a new image 400 x 300 pixels. This is just my recommended size though, the size of the document is irrelevant.

2. You'll need a layer to work with. If you don't already have one (you probably will) then create a new one.

3. Hit D to set your colors to default: black as foreground and white as background. Go to Filter>Render>Clouds to make what will be the base of our water texture.

4. Go to Filter>Blur>Radial Blur and use these settings - Amount: 38, Blur Method: Spin, Quality: Good (unless you don't mind waiting a little bit, in that case choose Best). Then go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur with a radius of 2 because we want this to be blurry to the max.

5. Go to Filter>Sketch>Bas Relief and choose the settings - Detail: 13, Smoothness 10. Next go to Filter>Sketch>Chrome and select the following options - Detail: 5, Smoothness 2.

6. Now to add color. Duplicate the layer by going to the Layers palette and dragging the layer with the water texture onto. Click on the eyeball to the left of the new layer you just made to hide it. Select the original (lower) layer and go to Image>Adjust>Channel Mixer. You may want to make it a different color, but to copy the blue I used make these changes - in the Red Output Channel move the blue to the left; in the Green Output Channel move the green slightly to the right; in the Blue Output Channel move the blue to the right. Next click on the at the top of the layers palette and choose New Adjustment Layer. Then choose Hue/Saturation as the type. Play around with the Hue and the Saturation bars until the blue color looks the way you like it.

7. Now click the upper layer in the Layers palette. In the left drop-down box change Normal to Color Dodge and lower the Opacity real low to about 5-10%. (This layer brightens the lightest areas of the image and makes them glow a little). As a final touch you may want to adjust the Hue/Saturation layer again (just double click it) or try adjusting the Curves of the lowest layer (click it and hit Ctrl/M).

8. First make sure you save your file. Then flatten your layers by going Layer>Flatten Image. Next go Filter>Other>Offset. Fill in the coordinates - Horizontal: 200, Vertical: 200. After that, go Filter>Distort>Twirl select 120° as the angle. Now you may be done here if you like the way it looks, but I had a poor turn out on this example - the four sections were still clearly visible. So to correct this simply add one more filter. Go Filter>Distort>ZigZag and choose - Amount: 10, Ridges: 5, Pond Ripples.

9. Just for fun, you may want to see your image in seamless-tiling glory. Hit Ctrl/A to select all, then go to Edit>Define Pattern. Create a new image (about 800x800 pixels), click the paint bucket, set Contents to Pattern in the Options palette, and click in your blank image.