Happy spring!

As I said in the last PHSH Tutorial, I’ll be keeping with the rain effect theme for this one as well, and show you how to make a wet road reflection/puddle.

There are actually 3 different ways I’ve discovered to to do this, but this one is the one that works best with the Rain Effect I showed you last time.

See how much more realistic the rain effect looks when you pair it with this wet road reflection?

Let’s show you how to do it!

 

Step 1

For this effect, you’ll want to start with a picture you’ve already applied the Rain Effect to, or are planning to add the rain effect to.

If you are using a picture you’ve already done the rain effect on, the first step is to hide the rain layer. To do this, go to the Layers Panel, and you should see a little box in front of the layer thumbnail that has an eye on it. Click it, and you should notice the layer will be ‘hidden’, as well as, the eye disappeared.

Once you hide the rain layer, you’ll want to duplicate the image you’re using. To do this, hold down ALT and click and drag the Layer either up or down. Once you have 2 image Layers, you’ll want to work with the one on top.

 

Step 2

Next, (making sure the top image Layer is selected), you’ll want to go over to your Lasso tool, and select Polygon Lasso Tool from the drop-down menu that appears.

Now, you’ll want to use this tool to outline the road (or ground), being sure to not include the trees. To do this, you’ll want to start by clicking slightly outside your work document, and then you’ll notice you are dragging a line.

Drag this line along the road in your picture. If you have a not-straight line, you can click at any point to ‘fix’ part of the line to the picture. Do this until you have selected the whole road, and brought your line back to the beginning point of your selection.

I realize that might sound a little confusing, so I’ve shown you using a red line how I did this on my picture.

Once you bring the line back to your starting point, the line you made should start flashing and be dotted, as if you used the Selection Tool to select it instead. (But you can’t use the Selection Tool, because that tool only allows you to select things in either a square/rectangle or circular shape)

 

Step 3

Now, you’ll want to go down to the Layer Mask button, which is located at the bottom of the Layers Panel, to apply a Layer Mask to the layer.

You’ll know the Layer Mask has been applied when a black and white thumbnail shows up next to the thumbnail of the image. Then, you’ll need to click on the Link picture that is between the two thumbnails. This will, (not surprisingly) un-link the Layer Mask.

 

Step 4

Once you’ve done that, make sure you click on the image thumbnail (the thumbnail that’s closest to the eye), and then you’ll want to Flip Vertically. To do this, you can click on one of the Transform squares that are around the image, then right-click and select Flip Vertically from the drop-down menu.

After doing this, you should see the image is upside down, and is showing only in the road selection you made.

If not, or if the image is too high (as was in my case) you’ll want to just lower the image, until the edges of the road line up with that of the non-flipped image. Or, until you feel it’s low enough.

 

Step 5

At this point, with the Layer Mask being aligned, the picture should look like a mirror perfect mirror image. Now, if you needed to add a mirror reflection to an image, you’d be done by this point.

However, we’re making a puddle, so we’ll need to use our Eraser tool. Go up to the top panel and change the Brush Size to about a Medium size, and set the Hardness pretty low. You’ll also want to change the Opacity to about 96%.

Now that we have our Eraser set, it’s time to form the puddle shapes. To do this, you’ll want to just start erasing any part of the flipped picture you don’t want to keep.

Do this for the entire flipped image, until you’re happy with the way your reflection is looking. You can erase as much, or as little of the image as you’d like – it all depends on what you want the final image to look like.

 

Step 6

Once you’re happy with what you have left, go up to Filter – Blur – Motion Blur, and make the Angle 0, and the Distance something small, like 6. The Distance will entirely depend on your image, but try to keep it on the smaller side.

You want to add just enough Motion Blur for the image to look slightly blurry, since we are creating this reflection for a lighter rainfall.

If, for example, you were adding this to a heavier thunderstorm picture, you could make the Distance greater, as that would make the reflection look more blurry.

 

Step 7

Once you’re happy with the amount of blur your reflection has, you can go ahead and unhide your Rain layer, to see how the image looks with all the effects together.

This looks pretty good, but see how un-hiding the Rain made the picture lighter? You could keep the image lighter if you wanted, but, to me, it doesn’t look as realistic, because it’s often cloudy/dark when raining.

To fix this, you can go up to the Adjustments Panel, which sits on top of the Layers Panel, and then click on the Brightness/Contrast icon, which is the icon that looks like a sun/moon.

In the Panel that pops up, you can now lower the Brightness and/or Contrast of the image, until you’re happy with the final product.

And that’s it!

You now have a great, more-realistic rain picture!

As always, don’t forget to Save both a PHSH file so you can come back in and Edit things later, as well as a JPEG/PNG file for showing off on social media.

You’ll have 2 months to practice this Wet Road technique, before we pivot to almost the exact opposite side of the effects spectrum: Glitter!

---

Like this tutorial? Check out the rest of the series here!

Also, consider becoming a Patron! You can support me for as little as $1/month, and your contribution will help me keep the blog going!