Water Reflection Tutorial (Video)

by | Jan 21, 2012 | Fundamentals | 18 comments

 

 

 

Taking inspiration right out of the Bob Ross playbook, I put together this little tutorial showing a really easy and fast way to Photoshop a water reflection into an architectural illustration. You may notice some correlation to my “Wet Street” tutorial, however, this tutorial has some minor changes and uses a little cleaner workflow. I have been wanting to do a water reflection tutorial for a while now, and finally was able to come up with an easy enough workflow that still looks good and worthy of a post.

One other thing, some views may not be at eye level like the video shows where you can simply mirror the building for the reflection. In cases where the camera is at a bird’s eye view, I would suggest just rendering a glass surface in place of the water in Kerkythea, before Photoshopping. This will give an accurate reflection and doesn’t add to the rendering time.

 

no_water_alex_hogrefe_tutorial

Above, the initial image before post-processing

 

 

with_water_alex_hogrefe_tutorial

Above, the final image with the water reflection added using only Photoshop

 

 

 

 

18 Comments

  1. mr.tu on January 22, 2012 at 9:31 am

    wow! it's simple but amazing and impressive.
    thanks for the tut, alex.

  2. stan on January 22, 2012 at 6:04 pm

    another amazing tutorial Alex!!
    one question though, are you using a tablet in your tutorials?

  3. Alex Hogrefe on January 23, 2012 at 12:29 am

    I do not use a tablet in any of my tutorials. Just a mouse and my laptop. I could never get comfortable with the Wacom tablets for some reason.

  4. school architects on January 29, 2012 at 4:29 am

    Before architecture are just for creating a unique designs and applied it to anything like building, houses, tower, furniture and many more. Now with the latest technology, architecture can also be applied to Photoshop using computers.

  5. winskyserin on February 1, 2012 at 6:20 am

    hello Alex Hogrefe I think you're a great man..I got a lot from the guidelines….hope you will do better.
    sorry for my english

  6. brian on November 21, 2012 at 9:50 pm

    Hey Alex love your tutorials was wondering where you got your grass from in this image

  7. Leandro Teixeira on January 13, 2014 at 2:14 pm

    Great Tutorial! Thanks a lot for share!

  8. JGHunter on October 23, 2014 at 7:57 am

    Thanks, is this quicker than setting up a reflective, refractive surface with caustics on a rendering program? I guess it depends on the geometry within the building..?

  9. carlo on July 20, 2015 at 12:31 am

    there isn’t anymore the vid!

  10. Japs on July 31, 2015 at 9:31 pm

    These tutorials look awesome. Unfortunately most of the videos appear to have been taken down. Is there any way we can get these up again?

    Thanks.

  11. lhu on August 11, 2015 at 10:27 am

    Still cant load the video…

  12. nima on September 13, 2015 at 7:55 pm

    very nice alex . your tutorials are the best!

  13. Z0 on March 19, 2016 at 7:04 pm

    THIS IS AMAZING! love it! : ]

  14. Pu on August 25, 2016 at 7:34 am

    Thanks,Alex!

  15. Joao on November 1, 2016 at 9:49 am

    Hi Alex

    Joao from South Africa. Dude your work is epic. Thank you so much for taking the time to make these tutorials, I have learnt so much, and judging by the comments so have so many others around the world, well done, and I look forward to hopefully seeing more in the future.

  16. Kenward on July 3, 2018 at 10:32 am

    Beautiful, Alex. Especially the text which really helps guide me through the tutorial.

  17. salma on July 27, 2018 at 5:41 pm

    THE MOST HELPFUL EASY AND EFFECTIVE TUTORIAL

  18. Rana on February 16, 2019 at 4:11 pm

    I’m so excited! Thank you So much! You deserve hundreds of likes. Amazing!

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