Author: Fuzzycroft at www.tombraiderforums.com |
Underwater effects in photoshop
This is a Photoshop tutorial to create some underwater effects for your XNALara poses. There are loads of different looks you can go for, and any number of ways of creating them - this is just one simple method I used to create this picture:
(click for larger)
I'm using Photoshop CS3 here, but you should be able to follow along easily enough in any version, or even any other decent image editing programs like Paint Shop Pro or GIMP.
Step 1 - create the pose
- Create your scene in XNALara, including all desired camera and lighting effects.
Step 2 - save in layers
- Save the background (shark.png) and foreground (lara.png) as separate images, each with a transparent background (make sure save alpha channel is ticked on when you save the image from XNALara).
- Open both images in Photoshop.
- Select the window for the lara.png image.
- Right click the layer in the Layers palette, and choose Duplicate Layer.
- In the dialog that pops up, choose shark.png in the Document drop-down menu and click OK.
- Close lara.png.
- You should now have two layers in the shark.png document, one with the shark, and another on top with Lara.
- Save the document as a PSD (and be sure to save regularly as you're working!).
Step 3 - create the water
- Create a new layer and drag it underneath the shark layer.
- Fill the new layer with a blue colour you want for the water.
- Duplicate the layer (right click it in the Layers palette and click Duplicate Layer followed by OK), and drag it above the Lara layer.
- Lower the opacity of this top layer to a value you're happy with, depending on how cloudy you want the water to look.
Step 4 - create some light rays
- Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make a selection spanning the height of your image, and a width of your choice.
- Hold down Shift and make some more selections next to the first, of varying widths.
- Once you've made enough selections to fill the width of your image, create a new layer underneath the shark layer.
- On the new layer, fill your selection with white.
- Duplicate the layer, and this time drag to the right.
- Make sure the second light ray layer is selected, and press Ctrl+E to merge it down to the first light ray layer.
- You now have a single light ray layer that extends beyond the canvas in both directions. Name it beams 1.
- Repeat this process again, but this time on a layer in between the shark and Lara layers.
- Make your selections different to the first for a better effect. Name it beams 2.
- Lower the opacity of both beams layers (10% will do for now).
- Select both beams layers (in the Layers palette, click beams 1, then Ctrl+click beams 2 - and be sure to click the layer name, not the thumbnail next to it!).
- Select the Move Tool and drag both layers to the right, so that there's minimal overhang on the left side.
- Select Edit > Transform > Distort.
- You may need to zoom out to see the transform selection box.
- Click and drag the top right corner to the left, while holding down Shift.
- Select the beams 1 layer.
- Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
- Blur the layer using a value you're happy with. Don't overdo it - you still want definition in the lines, but you want to take the hard edge off.
- Select the beams 2 layer and press Ctrl+F to apply the blur on this layer also.
- Take the opacity down again so that they're just only just visible. Again, adjust this to your liking.
Step 5 - add some specks
- Create a new layer above beams 1.
- Choose the Brush Tool, and configure a small brush with 0% hardness.
- With white selected as your foreground colour, dot some specks randomly around the place. Adjust the brush size now and again so they're not all the same size.
- If you're more familiar with brush settings, you can set up a brush with size jitter and scattering to make this easier, but it's not a big deal to do it the long way.
Step 6 - add some bubbles
- Create a new layer in between the top water layer and the Lara layer.
- Select the Elliptical Marqee Tool.
- Make a selection while holding down Shift to make a circle.
- Make sure white is selected as your foreground colour, and go to Edit > Stroke.
- Enter a value of your liking (depending on what you want your bubbles to look like, and the size of your image).
- Make another new layer above the current one.
- Make some more selections inside the circle for some highlights on the bubble.
- Fill the highlights white on your new layer.
- Blur both the bubble highlight and bubble outline layers with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
- You can do the previous steps all on the one layer if you want, but you may want to blur the outline more or less than the highlights, in which case keep them separate.
- When you're happy with the bubble, merge the two layers together.
- Duplicate the bubble layer several times, and distribute them about the scene.
- For each duplicated bubble layer, select the layer and press Ctrl+T to transform it. Adjust the scale and rotation of each so that they appear randomly distributed.
- For an even better effect, you could create several different bubbles instead of duplicating just one.
- Alternatively, again if you're more familiar with Photoshop brushes you could create a bubble brush and spray it around with size/rotation jitter.
- Create a new layer set, and move all the bubble layers into it (just drag and drop).
- Select the bubbles layer set.
- Set the blending mode to Color Dodge.
- Lower the opacity.
- If it still looks like they're too prominent and distracting, you can blur them some more:
- Right click the layer set and select Merge Group.
- Everything in the group will be merged into a single layer, which you can then blur with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
Final step - add your extra details
- Add any extra embellishments you want (laser stuff not included here, since it's just about the underwater effects)!
Hope you found it useful 