How to Add Reflections in Photoshop
Hello everybody! Yanik Chauvin here, from Yanik photo school on another video tutorial in Photoshop. This time I'm going to show you how to do a reflection from a white background. It’s fairly simple to do. It can be done with objects as you can see right now in front of you or it can be done with people as well which can be pretty useful if you're doing stock photography and you want the illusion of a floor, a nice shiny floor. We can do that and that’s what I will be showing you today.
This is an example of our product that you can do so you can use anything, a tennis ball, an apple you name it. I use a stethoscope here and what we’ll be doing is the same thing but using a person. Let me minimize this and bring up my image. Now I’ll be using this image quite frankly because it’s on my post processing list so I'm killing two birds with one stone today teaching you something and getting ahead in my post processing for my stock photography.
So moving right along the first thing we need to do as always is duplicate our layer, control J, second layer appears. And next thing we need to do if we’re going to be doing a reflection we need room to do that reflection on so we’re going to increase our canvas size. We do that by going into image here on the top menu and clicking on canvas size. Now we want the canvas to expand downwards, so we’re going to click on this arrow here so it’s going to expand it downwards. For visualization for me I'm better in pixels so I’ll select pixels and you kind want to double the actual length of your image right now.
So my height is close to 3000 pixels here. So I’ll just go to 6000 just an easy number and click enter. And the thing that you can see if I go full screen it went to black because I didn’t choose the right background. So let me just undo that, do it again canvas size, choose my color first, it’s usually always the white I must done an image with the black background not too long ago and click back on the arrow get back to pixels, 6000, enter there we go, perfect.
Now the next thing we want to do is duplicate our image here so that we can reflect it. We’re going to use our selection tool here which is the rectangular marquee tool and as close as I can make sure that your style is on normal and not six ratio like I was on. And just select your person or your object and then we’re going to copy that. We do that by either going into edit copy or control C. And once we’ve copy that, we’ll paste it just the same thing. You can do edit paste right here or control V and we have a paste object. You can see a third layer period up here.
Now we want to slip that layer. What we do is we’re going to edit transform flip vertical, boom! And our layer is flipped, now we want to moved this layer down I will going to give you a little bit of a hint here, if you start moving it around and then it’s not really align properly and you're not sure exactly when you got to zoom it a lot. If you want to make sure that is perfectly aligned what you need to do is just hold the shift key down while you move your object down and that will bring it down in a straight line, alright.
This is fun for this picture since she’s jumping in the air we don’t necessarily have to have it touching toe to toe. So we can make her jump as high or as low as we want and since she is a business woman all dressed up we want to make sure that she’s not jumping too high and that looks good to me. So there we go were starting to have sort of our reflection going down. Now of course reflections are always a lot lighter than the original image because its light refracting from the surface. So what we need to do is reduce the opacity on that layer. And we do that by clicking on the opacity slider here and reducing the opacity. I like to put it between 20% and 25% depending on the darkness or the lightness and there we go we’re starting to have some what other reflection here.
Now another thing for the reflection to be more realistic is to add a gradient for the reflection to fade out. So let’s do that, first thing we need to do since were working on the white background is select white as our foreground color, alright. Next thing we need to go is select our gradient tool. Once that’s selected, make sure up here in the panel that you selected the second option which is white to transparent and that’s what we’ll be using and make sure that the first icon here is selected which is the default linear gradient.
And once that’s selected you want to go back to our flip layer and wherever we want the gradient to start grandieting if you want I don’t know if that’s the word. You click and then holding the shift key again it’ll do a straight line and you let go and voila. If you don’t like it you can always undo it and redo it again. I like it the way it is right now, that’s perfect for me and we’ve got some excess white down there. All we need to do after that is to crop out the excess white like so and I have a finished image from my stock photo library and that’s how we do our reflection. That looks pretty realistic actually. I hope you enjoy this tutorial on creating a reflection on a white background and stay tune for more. Bye-bye.
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