Water Droplet

We’re going to create a realistic looking water droplet with a quick and simple technique that can be applied in minutes. To start off with, we’ll need a photo to apply our droplet to. I’m using a leaf. Feel free to use mine for the purpose of this tutorial. Go ahead, I just grabbed it off StockXchg anyway.

Fig 1

I’m going to zoom in a bit here so we can see what we’re doing. To start, make a circular selection where you want your water droplet to be.

Fig 2

Now hit Ctrl+C to copy the selected area. Without releasing the selection, hit Ctrl+V to paste the part of the leaf you copied right back into the same spot. It will look just like it did when we started, but you’ll have a small circular section of the leaf on a new layer. That’s what we’re after. Name that layer “Droplet.”

Now double click on the layer in the Layers palette to bring up the Layer Styles and apply the following.

Inner Shadow

Fig 3

Inner Glow:

Fig 4

Your droplet should now look like this:

Fig 5


Now Ctrl+Click on the droplet layer to load the selection. Create a new layer and go to Select - Modify - Contract and contract the selection by 6 (you’ll need to adjust this if your droplet is much larger or smaller). Then hit Ctrl+Alt+D to feather the selection and enter a value of 3. Fill the selectin with white and lower the layer opacity to 60%.

Fig 6

Now create another new layer and Ctrl+Click the droplet layer again. Once more, contract the selection, this time by 3, and again feather the selection, but only by 1.

Now grab the gradient tool and, using a white to transparent gradient, start just atove the selection and drag down from the top left to about its center. This should fill your slightly feathered selection with a thin white gradient as shown bwlow.

Fig 7

Got that? Good. Now save your file, because we’re going to take drastic measures here. Let’s merge the two hilight layers we just created with the droplet layer, so that our entire droplet is on one layer, above our origional leaf photo.

Now go to Filter - Liquify. Using a large soft brush, slowly drag it over the top right portion of your dew droplet to give it a little distortion, as if it were running down the edge of the leaf.

Fig 8

Your droplet should now look like this:

Fig 9


That made things a bit fuzzy, so lets’ put some definition back in there. Go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask and apply an amount of 300% and a radius of 0.4. Click Ok. As you can see from the image below, thsi will also improve the contrast within our water droplet, giving it a real sparkle.

Fig 10

Almost done! Let’s double click on the layer in the Layers palette and bring up the layer styles again. This time, we’re going to apply a dropshadow like so.

Fig 11

And that just about wraps it up. All we have left to do is lower the opacity of the droplet layer to around 75%. Once you’ve done that, you’re finished. Here’s our finished water drop!

Fig 12

Added Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 8:40 pm under Drawing & Painting.