How to Create Reflecting Bubbles in Photoshop
In this tutorial I will try to explain the process of creating some bubbles with reflections of the objects in your photos. You should follow the procedure described in this tutorial but you shouldn’t follow the styles’ values blindly, since different images will require different values and/or blending modes. Experiment until you get a good-looking result.
Our photo for this tutorial was downloaded from bittersweetvenom from deviantart.com and it looks like this:
First you need to duplicate the background layer (Ctrl+J) and make a selection of the portion of the photo that you want to be reflected in the bubble(s). With the selection ready, go to Select > Inverse to invert the selection and hit Delete in order to delete everything outside the selection. Name the new layer Bubble, or something like that.
Scale the new layer to around 25% of the original size. Go to Edit > Transform > Scale and type 25 in the W: (width) and H: (height) fields.
Now, flip the duplicate horizontally (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal) so you can get the reflection of the original image. Then, go to Edit > Transform > Perspective to adjust the perspective of the bubble. It should look something like this:
Then, in order to make a sphere, select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and hold down Shift to make the perfect circle. Make a round selection on the bubble layer. Delete everything outside the sphere by inverting your selection (Select > Inverse or Shift+Ctrl+I) and hitting Delete. Now Select the sphere by inverting your selection again.
You should now apply some distortion filters to your image and the best one to choose here, since we’re making bubbles, is the Spherize filter (Filter > Distort > Spherize…). Set the maximum amount of 100% and hit OK.
After that, change the foreground color to a lighter color and select “Gradient Overlay” from the Layer Style menu (Layer > Layer Style). From the list of gradient overlay presets choose Foreground to Transparent. Change the Blending mode of the style to Soft Light, check the Reverse box and set the Style to Radial.
After this step, go to Layer Style menu and choose Blending Options and change to Color Dodge or experiment with other Blending Options (usually Screen) and see which one suits your photo best. After that, set the Fill of the layer to 60-70%.
After you’ve decided which option to go with, apply the Inner Shadow layer style and set the Blending Mode to Soft Light and adjust the settings to around Distance > 25, Choke > 55 and Size > 45. You could also experiment with these values and find the most suitable ones.
You can apply Outer Glow layer style, as well as the Inner Glow style to make your bubbles bubblier. Experiment with both of these layer styles’ values until you’re happy with the result. Different original images will require differently valued layer styles, so be patient and experiment. When you’re happy with your bubble, you can duplicate and transform it and create as many as you need.
A tutorial by Bonifacio Cruz
