Hi, guys! Yanik here for Yanik Photo School and today what we’re going to be doing is revisiting an old and very popular tutorial that I did which was called adding a reflection to an object. Now, the reason why I’m revisiting this tutorial is that I’ve had quite a few people comment on the fact that my reflection didn’t look realistic and I think we’re just too perfect over reflection and wanted to know how they can make it look more realistic like it’s really on another surface with some texture in it. So, I figured that was a really, really good idea and that’s what we’re going to be doing today.
Now, I won't be going through all the steps that I did from the first video tutorial. As you can see, I already added the reflection here. If I just to show you here, I can remove the layer and I just kind of duplicated it, flipped it over and brought it down and cleaned up a little bit. You can go through all those steps in the first video tutorial that I put the link on right above this video.
Now, what we’re going to be doing from this point on is continuing to make this reflection as realistic as possible. So, first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to reduce the opacity of this layer and bring it down to about 25%, that looks good to me. And the next thing to make it more realistic is adding a new layer, clicking on this add new layer button here, and we’re going to paint in a gradient white to transparent. As you click here you have other options here. Make sure your white is your top color here in your palette and then just select white to transparent here and make sure that your gradient, the first gradient selection is selected. And then holding the shift key down, click and drag, that way it makes a nice straight line and you get your reflection kind of diffused like that.
Now, once we have that, that’s how I basically finished the last tutorial. And it looks pretty good but add some of you point it out, if not that realistic looking. Now, how to make this more realistic, first of all we’ve got to select our phone flip layer and not work on the gradient layer. It all depends, I’ve been playing around with some of the filters in Photoshop and it all depends what surface you want your phone to be on basically because there’s a quite a few options that we can do and let’s go through a few of them together.
Now, the one that I figured out to be my favorite in blur, it was a motion blur and basically I put a 45 degree angle on the motion blur. I put the distance at about 20 pixels and now this depends on the size of your image and the effect you want to put on it and it kind of gives you a preview here of the effect that it does, it’s a bit of an angle sheen on it, then I just click okay and if we look at this at 100%, and we just before and after, you get that nice little blurring effect but on a bit of an angle there. It looks like you’re shooting on a flexi glass that has a bit of a texture in it and I really like that feeling. So, that was one solution.
Another one was going into filter and just doing a standard Gaussian blur. Filter, blur, Gaussian blur and you can play, put as little or as much blur as you want, click okay, going back full screen we can see that effect, before and after. It’s just a regular blur. It doesn’t give it much texture though like the previous motion blur and that’s another way of adding that. It will be considered smoother texture on your table, maybe glass or something like that.
The next one that I found a bit interesting was in distort and called ocean ripple and when we play that one on. All right, distort, ocean, okay. Now, you can see here, the effect that it gives it and you can play with the ripple size a little bit and the ripple magnitude and it kind of gives you like this stained glass type of effect as if your phone is on a textured glass service. Now, I really like that effect and you can see what it does here. If we zoom back, it gives it a bit of texturish feeling to it that looks kind of real. So, what you want to do because it’s kind of edgy a little bit. I kind of added a little bit of our Gaussian blur on top of that, just light, not too much just a little bit around 2 pixels and that made it look more realistic as well.
So, there you go, a couple of ways to make your reflection a little bit more realistic with a bit of texture. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on, I guess it’s like a part two to my first one and we’ll be seeing you soon, Yanik Chauvin signing out, bye, bye!
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