Just Mousing Around ~ Underwater Scene Tutorial

..: Underwater Scene Tutorial :..

Water and glass effects are challenging because neither substance, in its purest element, has any real colour to speak of. In order to achieve realistic digital interpretations, then, we must rely on shadows and highlights to give the illusion of transparency, refraction and reflection.

I, for one, have no idea how to do that. lol! But, I'm willing to tread on some thin ice and offer this tutorial. It's a somewhat believable underwater scene, and it is my hope that you will find it useful in some way.

This tutorial was written for PSP6, but should translate with no difficulty in both version 5 and 7.

You'll need Greg Shorno's Sine Blob IV filter for this tutorial. It is found in Greg's Factory Outlet Vol. II collection. If you don't have this set of filters you can download them here. Scroll about halfway down the page and you will see it listed just below the Blade Pro Presets section.

Begin by opening a new canvas (File|New) that is 400 x 400 pixels with a white background and 16.7 million colours.

1. Go to Image>Plug-in Filters>Greg's Factory Outlet Vol.II>Sine Blobs IV and use these settings on the control screen:

sine blob control settings

2. Go to Colors>Grey Scale. Go to Colors>Increase Color Depth>16 Million colors.

3. Image>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Give it a radius of 6.00

4. Colors>Solarize. Set the threshold at 1. Go to Colors>Adjust>Brightness and Contrast. Set Brightness to -35 (that's minus 35) and Contrast to 0.

5. Go to Masks>New>From Image... and set up the window thusly:

mask window set-up

...then go to Masks>Delete and click yes in the pop-up box. <--don't forget to do this bit, ok?

6. Click on the deformation tool. Grab the top center control handle and drag it down to about 150 (on the left side ruler). This is not crucial... just drag it to somewhere near there.

7. Grab the Eraser tool and set the controls up suchly: (I love the words thusly, suchly and muchly... actually, I love them so much that if I had had triplets, that's what I would have named them. I'm kidding, you know... cuz if I was going to name children that way, the words would have to be capitalized and then they'd look funny... lol!)

eraser set-up

... and using a kind of scalloped edge idea, erase just the top (upper) edge of the background. All we're trying to do with this step is to get rid of the straight edge that's there now. We do so need that undulating thing to be happening... it's a need I can't explain... ;) No two people will erase the same, which is, as Martha Stewart would say, "a good thing". How much you erase will have a direct effect on how much depth of field your ocean bottom will have... so don't get too eraser-happy... just pretty up that harsh, flat edge up there.

8. Okie dokie... almost done with this pesky background. Click on the Selection tool and choose as your weapon the plain old rectangle with antialias on but no feather. Get snug up there in the top left corner of your window at the 0,0 mark and drag a rectangle across the entire window and down to just below (like maybe a quarter inch below) your lowest scalloped edge. Go to Selections>Modify>Feather and opt for 15. Now hit your delete key just once. Selections>Select None. Set the layer blend mode on the Background to Soft Light.

Whewwww... we are done with the background... what say we all kick back with a dozen margaritas and a shrimp cocktail and talk about the price of tea in China?

Or... we could just keep on pluggin'... ;)

To Part Two > >