Photoshop Tutorials: Add Realistic Water Drops To A Photo
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Written By Steve Patterson
In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to easily add realistic looking water drops to a photo, as if someone splashed water all over the image. We're going to be using a few filters and adjustments to create some random water drop shapes, and then we'll be making them look like water using a few simple layer styles to add shadows and highlights to them.
To finish things off and add an extra bit of realism, we'll be using a displacement map to distort the image underneath the water drops. It may sound complicated but it's all very easy, as we'll see.
Here's the original image I'll be working with:
And here's what the image will look like after adding the water drops:
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
We're going to start off this tutorial in the same way we begin many of our tutorials, by duplicating our Background layer. With the image open in Photoshop, we can see in the Layers palette that we currently have just one layer, the Background layer, which contains the original image:
We need to duplicate the Background layer, and to do that, we can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). If we look back in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have two copies of the image, with the copy of the Background layer (which Photoshop has named "Layer 1") above the original:
Step 2: Add A New Blank Layer Above The Duplicate Layer
Next, we need to add a new blank layer above our newly-created duplicate layer. Let's use the keyboard shortcut for that as well, which is Shift+Ctrl+Alt+N (Win) / Shift+Command+Option+N (Mac). By adding the Alt/Option key in there, that tells Photoshop not to bother popping up the dialog box asking us to name the layer and to just go ahead and add it, giving it the default name of "Layer 2" instead and placing it at the top of the Layers palette:
Step 3: Fill The New Layer With White
We're going to fill our new layer with white, so press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset your Foreground and Background colors if neccessary, so white becomes your Background color. Then, with "Layer 2" selected in the Layers palette (the currently selected layer is the one highlighted), press Ctrl+Backspace (Win) / Command+Delete (Mac) to fill the new layer with the Background color, which in our case is white. Your image will now be completely filled with white:
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