Under Water Texture in Photoshop

Digital cameras may be one of the greatest tools in the modern artist's inventory, but they do have their limitations. Without specialist (and expensive) equipment, for example, it is a very bad idea to try and take underwater shots, especially ones that rely on the camera being several meters underwater!

This tutorial details a simple way to keep your feet dry and create a realistic texture that closely resembles the surface of water if seen from below. The technique is relatively flexible and can form the basis of more complicated creations, if you are willing to experiment.

Step 1: Create a new document of a suitable size with a default white-filled background. I opted for 300*300px, but this effect will look just fine with any dimension. Set your foreground colour swatch as a dark-blue (#043E7E) and your background color swatch as solid white (#FFFFFF). Now run filter > render > clouds once. You should end up with something that resembles my image on the left. Don't worry if it doesnt look exactly the same - the clouds filter uses a random seed, so the results will always look a little different.

Step 2: We now need to add our ripple effect. To do this, run Filter > Distort > Ripple, change the amount to 999% and the size to large. Press OK. Repeat the filter again, but this time set the amount to 999% and the size to medium. Press OK, and your basic ripple effect will be complete! Of course, this doesn't look overly realistic, so we should now run our new texture through a few extra optional steps...

Variant 1: Solar Glare For that little bit of added realism we can add solar glare to make it look as if the sun is partially reflecting off the water. To do this, run filter > render > lighting effects with the settings shown below.

Step 5: And there you go - one simple 'water surface from below' effect, ready for further manipulation or useful as a stock effect all by itself.

Variant 2: Color Loss It should be borne in mind, of course, that the light spectrum can be substantially affected by the relative density of the water. This often presents itself as a green tinge to the water if the camera source is quite deep. To reproduce this effect, simply go to the Layer > Layer Effect > Color Overlay dialog and enter in a color of #6DB829, with a blend mode of Normal and an opacity of 33%. Throw in the solar glare mentioned above and you should have an excellent texture that resembles my image on the right below. Enjoy! ;)