Today’s 30 Days of Aviary Tip: Surface Reflections
Surface reflections can be a tricky thing to fake using photo manipulation. Because in reality a reflection is inherently going to be a different angle of light than the thing it’s reflecting. When faking a reflection when you only have the original photo, you’re going to have to manipulate the photo a lot so that the viewer can’t easily tell that it’s just an inversion of the original image.
Most of the time people won’t notice things like the fact that the reflection of this lizard’s head “should be” really reflecting the underside of the lizard’s chin, not just an upside down version of his face. The only thing that really stands out to the viewer is when the reflections don’t correctly connect with the part of the subject that’s touching the floor and that’s what we’ll by learning how to ‘fix’ in this post and in the full reflections tutorial.
Essentially, you’re going to want to use the Lasso Tool to divide up and copy onto new layers each part of the subject that touches the ground, dividing them at the spot where they touch each other. So if you’re doing a human standing up straight, you’d want to get each of their feet and legs on a new layer, and their body on another layer. In the case of this lizard, it touches the ground at 6 different points: It’s four feet, it’s belly touching the ground, and it’s tail. You’ll want to crop each of those points the best that you can and put them on their own layer.
Once you have each of your reflection cut up parts on a new layer, use Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical to flip them around so they appear to be reflecting off the floor. The next step is to use the Transform Tool to accomplish two things: Connect each part to both the point at which it touches the floor, and the point at which it touches the other parts. It sounds confusing, but basically you want to make sure each of the lizard’s legs touched the reflection of themselves as well as reasonably reconnected to the body. It may take some use of the eraser tool and some patch work to make it look right.
Finally, you should have a bunch of sections that appear to be connected to each other and to the floor. To make this selection look more like a reflection, put a gradient between it in the top layer. You may also want to blur your reflection, depending on the kind of reflective surface you’re floor is supposed to be. A good side effect of this blur and gradient is that it makes flaws in the reflection less noticeable.
If you can use this tip to achieve a convincing reflection effect, let us see, we’d love to showcase it here.
