Photoshop Water Reflection - Add A Realistic Water Reflection

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to easily add a realistic water reflection to any photo. It's a very easy effect to create and you can add it to any photo you like, although it tends to work best with images that don't already contain water in them.

We'll be using a simple filter and a displacement map to create the water ripple effect, and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to give our water a little color.

Here's the photo that I'll be working with throughout this tutorial:

The original image.

And here's what our image is going to look like after adding the water reflection :

The final result.

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to easily add a realistic water reflection to any photo. It's a very easy effect to create and you can add it to any photo you like, although it tends to work best with images that don't already contain water in them.

We'll be using a simple filter and a displacement map to create the water ripple effect, and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to give our water a little color.

Here's the photo that I'll be working with throughout this tutorial:

The original image.

And here's what our image is going to look like after adding the water reflection :

The final result.

Not what you're looking for? Check out our other Photo Effects tutorials!

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Let's get started.

Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With our image newly opened inside Photoshop, we can see in the Layers palette that we currently have one layer, the Background layer, which contains our image:

The original image on the Background layer in the Layers palette.

We need to duplicate the Background layer, and we can do that using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Now when I look in my Layers palette now, I can see that I now have two layers - my original Background layer on the bottom and a new layer, "Layer 1", above it which is my duplicate:

Press "Ctrl+J" (Win) / "Command+J" (Mac) to duplicate the Background layer.

Step 2: Add More Canvas Space To The Bottom Of The Document

We're going to add our water reflection below the image, so let's add some canvas space to the bottom of our document to make room for our reflection. To do that, go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Canvas Size. This will bring up Photoshop's "Canvas Size" dialog box. The easiest thing to do here is to add twice as much canvas space as what we currently have, but we only want it to appear at the bottom of the document, not above it or on either side, so we need to tell Photoshop exactly where we want this extra canvas space to go.