|
|
 |
|
 |
Seamless Water Texture
Creating a tile-able water texture in Photoshop
|
| I was trying to reproduce a cool water effect I saw on the web
one day, and this was the result. It turned out to be a pretty
useful technique actually. In addition with using it for image
backgrounds, this texture make a great reflection map for more
complicated works such as chrome objects. |
|
 |
 Start
by opening Photoshop and creating a new image. For this example, I chose
dimensions of 400x400 pixels. (Note that all example images in this
tutorial are scaled down by 50% and can be enlarged to full size if you
click them). 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
|
 |
 Now
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 (I didn't), 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.
|
 |
 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.
|
 |
 Ok
time to try to color in this masterpiece of wetness. There are an infinite
number of ways you could go about doing this, so I'll just show you the
general method I followed. 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. After
that, 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).
|
 |
 Well,
now you have a pretty decent-looking water texture. You would be done if
this was merely a water texture tutorial, but this is a seamless water
texture tutorial. 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. That should do the trick, and you will end up with a perfectly
seamless water texture. 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. You can click the image to the left to see my example looks.
Refreshing, eh?!
|
|
Water textures have been known to make stellar 3D text.
|
|
|
