TIP: holding the SHIFT key down will keep the gradient from applying at an angle, it will just go straight up. So, to apply it to our reflection start with the cross hairs for the tool in the middle of your image, near the bottom. NOTE: “undo” is your best friend in Photoshop, if you learn no other keyboard shortcuts, memorize this one!
Sometimes it takes a little experimenting to get it just right but you can always “undo” using the handy “command/control+z” shortcut on your keyboard and it goes back one step or undoes what you just applied. With the gradient tool, by default it paints from the foreground color, to the background – fading from one to the other depending on how we create the gradient. So we want to hide the outer edges of this layer so it fades out gradually towards the bottom of the image and looks more natural. Where ever there is black on the mask it hides that area of the layer. How masks work is that anything in white on the mask reveals the contents of the layer. We need to make sure we are doing this on the mask, NOT the layer. If you layer thumbnail is selected, just click on the white layer mask thumbnail to make it active. You can tell because whatever is active has corner brackets around it. Once you have your colors set to black and white, and your gradient tool selected and ready for use – make sure you are on the layer mask not the layer. If you grab more than you need that’s fine we’ll be moving it around and masking later anyway. Make sure you go edge to edge on the sides, and get enough of the image vertically. Using the marque tool (“M” is the keyboard shortcut) draw a box around an area of your image that will become the reflection (see Figure #1 below). Let’s dive in a little deeper into each step STEP ONE – COPY This is the super condensed version for those quick readers and skimmers. I’m going to guess this will take less than 5 – ready GO! Here are the six easy steps to follow in Photoshop. **Note that also included me going super slow to ensure each of the 12 people in the class were on the same page with me. Many of my students were also self proclaimed “Photoshop novices” and when I asked them if they thought they’d be able to this when I showed the before and after images, most said “no”! But they all did, and we were done in less than 10 minutes. Some of them were using Elements (which works just fine, but you may find the menus and choices look slightly different), and this technique can be done using that program too, so if you use Elements, not to worry.
I recently showed one my HDR classes how to do this, and they all followed along with me step by step.
We’re going to learn how to go from this. In this article I’m going to demystify creating a reflection, a technique that works particularly well on images with open pavement, and HDR processed images which tend to make the pavement look wet already. Creating a reflection using Photoshop is one of those things that at first glance looks really hard, but really isn’t, once you break down the steps (just light Light Painting which I covered in another two part series).