From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

953 Adding some rippling, reflective ice shadows

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

953 Adding some rippling, reflective ice shadows

“

- [Instructor] All right, now, our candy cane rhino is looking fairly awesome. One problem, however, is that he doesn't have any shadows below his feet. And so notice that he casts no shadows, and he also has no reflection, which is why I'm going to show you how to add these rippling, reflective shadows in this very movie. And so first thing that we want to do is draw the shadows as standard rectangles. And let me show you what that looks like. I'll click in the ice and snow group below the rhino layer, and then I'll go ahead and select the Rectangle Tool from the Shape Tool fly out menu, which just happens to be the easiest way to work. Go ahead and zoom in a little bit, as well. And then I'll draw a rectangle just going from the foot, so midway into the foot there, all the way down to below the edge of the canvas. Now, we do not want a stroke for this effect. So go ahead and click on a stroke item right there and set it to No Color. And then what you want to do is click on the Fill and set it to Gradient. At which point, probably the easiest way to modify the gradient is to click on this gradient ramp right here in order to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box. Now, I'm going to double click on the first color stop, which, in my case, is black. And then I'll move my cursor out into the image window and lift a dark shade of blue, let's say, like so, and in the end, I'm looking for a hue value of 200%. I'll go ahead and crank the saturation value up to 100, and it'll take the brightness value down in my case to 50%, and then I'll click OK to accept that change. Now, the gradient is actually going to be a function of a couple of different opacity values, and so we only need one color. And so I'll grab that white color stop and drag it down like so, so that the entire gradient is blue. Notice the final opacity stop above and to the right of the gradient ramp has an opacity value of 100% So does the first color stop incidentally. Notice the opacity value didn't change. I'm going to take it down to 0%, and then I'm going to drag the opacity stop to this position right here, so that we have a location value of 60%. At which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, that's it. Now you can go ahead and hide the Properties panel. And now we're going to create a few more copies of this rectangle by switching to the black arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the Path Selection Tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow, and I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac. So I'm seeing a little plus sign next to my cursor, and I'll drag a copy of that rectangle over to this location right here. Inside Photoshop 2021 and later, you have the so-called on canvas controls that allow you to scale the rectangle like so. Thing is I don't really want to scale it that much taller because then I'll start seeing the rectangle behind the top of this foot. So I'll go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change. And then I'll go ahead and drag this right-hand side handle, and I'll press the Control key or the Command key on the Mac in order to invoke the skew function like so, and then I'll release. At which point, Photoshop will tell me that it's going to take this live shape and turn it into a regular path outline. I really couldn't care less. So I'll click Yes in order to accept that change. Alright, now let's create another copy of this guy by pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and dragging it over to this location. So we're just creating a bunch of rectangles on this one Rectangle 1 layer. Really should be called shadows. Should it not? And then notice that we have now lost our handles, and it's 'cause this guy is no longer a live shape. And so what I need to do is go to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform Path. And that'll bring some handles back, and I'll go ahead and drag this left handle right here, and I'll press the Control key as I drag so that I can skew it back upward so it better fits the foot. And actually I need to Control or Command drag it up a little more so that it's entirely hidden behind the foot but it fits it, as well. And then I'll go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. And I will press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac in order to drag a copy of that shape like so, and then I'll take advantage of Free Transform this time, just by pressing the keyboard shortcut of Control + T or Command + T on the Mac. I'll drag this side handle inward a little bit, and that actually looks very good. At which point, I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right, now what we need to do is add some rippling in the form of a couple of filters. Now, you can't apply filters directly to vector-based shape layers. So what we're going to have to do is first convert this layer to a Smart Object by right-clicking on an empty portion of that layer and then choosing Convert to Smart Object like so. All right, now let's apply a couple of Smart Filters by going up to the Filter menu, dropping down to Distort, and then you want to apply Ripple. And I'm going with the size of Large, which really isn't that large. These effects are fairly low resolution by modern standards, but I'll accept an Amount value of 100%. Can't really see a preview unless you drag around in this portion of the dialog box, but even then, you're lucky to find anything. So I'm just going to go ahead and click OK to apply that change. And you can see that we get pretty tiny ripples. Now, if you change your mind, you can just double click on Ripple and try out a different setting, but this is going to work out well enough for now. Now, we're not going to need this filter mask, this white thing right here. So I'll right -click on it and choose Delete Filter Mask just to give myself a little more room to see what's going on here inside the Layers panel. You want to return to the Filter menu, choose Distort once again, and then drop down to this command right here, Wave, which is a very complicated looking wave generator. Go ahead and take the number of generators down from one. It's set to five by default. You can accept the default Wavelength and Amplitude values, by the way, but while you want your horizontal scale value to be zero, you want to take your vertical scale value down to as low as it goes, which is one. At which point, you can see this tiny, little preview here, for all the good it's doing. Just go ahead and click OK in order to apply the effect. And you can see that you're waving your shadows back and forth. Now, Wave is a random filter, so your effects will vary from mine. If you don't like what you see, just double click on Wave, click on the Randomize button, and then click OK in order to try out a different effect. However, in my case, I liked what I had before. And so I'll just go ahead and select my Move Tool from the top of the toolbox. You can also get it by pressing the V key, and then you can just drag your shadows around so that they better match the feet on your rhinoceros. And you're probably going to still have a few minor issues. In which case, you can add a layer mask. And so with the shadows layer active, I'll click on the Add Layer Mask icon down here at the bottom of the Layers panel. And then I'll select my Brush Tool, which I can get by pressing the D key. And I'll right-click inside the image window. I'm looking for a Hardness value of 100% You can set the Size value to whatever you like. Mine is set to 30 pixels. At which point, I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now we want to be able to paint with black. So tap the D key to instate the default foreground and background colors, which are white and black respectively because we're working in a layer mask, and then press the X key to swap them so that the foreground color is black. And now just sort of paint right there in order to get rid of that little guy, and I'll paint here. I'm really just clicking as opposed to painting. And then I'll scroll over by spacebar dragging until I see this region. And then I might paint a way a little bit of stuff here where the final foot is concerned. A few more clicks with the Brush Tool should do the trick. Now I'll press Control + Zero or Command + Zero on the Mac in order to center my zoom. And I'll turn on this text group up here at the top of the Layers panel. And we ended up with is yummy piece of holiday candy, complete with these rippling, reflective ice shadows here inside Photoshop.

Contents