How to Automatically Generate Water and Reflections in Photoshop

If you are looking at creating more composite images in Photoshop, want to have a new tool at your disposal for future images, or want to spice up some older photos on your hard drive, this tutorial might be for you.

I have made some wholesale and creative edits to images in the past, both on brief and of my own accord, but adding realistic water was not something I would have considered outside of an artistic, composite image. But, with plugins and software using more advanced A.I., we're seeing the ceiling of what's possible rise for even amateur retouchers.

In this video, Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect shows how to use Flaming Pear's Flood 2 plugin for Photoshop. While it is a paid piece of software, the free trial is allegedly very generous with what it lets you do and a lack of restrictions. The customization options are numerous and you have a surprising level of control over exactly how the water looks. What I would say is that for an image to look realistic enough to fool even veteran photographers, you're going to need to know how to composite at a basic level anyway. For instance, matching colors, tones, exposures, and so on. However, used sparingly or in the right hands, this is an interesting tool, to say the least!

If you take Flaming Pear up on the free trial, let us know what you think of the plugin in the comment section below.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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2 Comments

Why should we learn matching colors, tones, exposures isn't there an app for that? We are progressing to a world in which we will not have to learn that is the job of AI.

We are just merely progressing towards a world where nothing matters anymore.