Part 5 - Water Turbulence
We have a pretty good river now. Right? Well it could be a bit better! What we need now are splashes of surface turbulence travelling with the river.
What I did was make some sets of lines that run parallel with the river banks and manipulate these to produce the turbulent layer. There's probably a much more efficient way of doing this but here's what I did...
1. Make a new white River Turbulence layer, channel to selection, grow selection 100px.
2. Default colours, Pencil Tool (Brush: Circle Fuzzy 15, Use Color From Gradient: checked, Gradient checkbox: unchecked, Length: 100 px, Repeat: Sawtooth).
3. Stroke selection with the pencil (emulate brush dynamics = true).
4. Shrink selection 41 (uncheck Shrink From Border). Change one or two of the Use Colour From Gradient settings (limit gradients to B&W ones) AND invert the selection gradient. Then repeat 3 above. Do this until there is no selection (or close to it).
This will give you a nice set of parallel dashes where each "run" is different from the others. It will also <b>really</b> highlight flat spots, flaring, etc in your curve
5. Create a new River Turbulence Noise layer and fill it with small sized (I used 4px), highest detail noise. Set this layer to non-visible.
6. Choose your River Turbulence layer and Displace (Filters->Map->Displace) it with your new noise layer. This should be a fairly small polar displace. I used Pinch: 20, Whirl: -20, Displace: Polar, Edge: Black. You may need to undo, tweak the settings and run again a couple of times to get this right.
7. You might have a few sections that are still not distorted enough. I loaded up IWarp (Filters->Distorts->IWarp) and did some <b>very</b> light swirling on those areas (Mode: Swirl, Radius: 25, Amount: 0.3, Binlinear: checked, Adaptive: checked and very lightly and briefly click in the areas that are too uniform). If you have any voids you could drop a little fuzzy 13 black brush in there and then blur it a bit. <b>Go light if you do!</b> This can give an unnatural end result.
8. Create a new black layer called River Turbulence Black just below your original River Turbulence layer.
9. Set your channel to selection so you can see what the lines wittin your river area are like. I was pretty happy with mine but you could do some manual adjusting with pinches, etc at this point if you felt the need. Deselect All when you are finished checking.
10. Run a light Gaussian Blur (5px), invert the colours on this layer, set your River Turbulence Noise layer back to visible and change it's mode to Addition. Those lines should now be a very noisy white!
11. Select the River Turbulence Noise layer and tone it down with Colors->Levels and set the lightest Output color to something like 75. Do the same with River Turbulence layer.
12. Use Layer->New From Visible and turn the other River Turbulence layers off.
13. Change the Visible layer's mode to Screen and go into Colors->Levels. Play with the Input settings until you have a very mild turbulence on the water surface. For me Shadow: 30, Gamma: 0.35, Highlight: 240 gave me a result I liked. You can tinker with this layers' opacity too. I was pleased with mine as-is.
14. Finally I used a Layer Mask to mask off the land, deleted the River Turbulence working layers and renamed Visible to River Turbulence.
Part 6 - River Debris
What is the debris layer? The following is simplified but suits our purposes...
Most, nearly all, rivers carry a certain amount of debris downstream.
There is surface debris. Rivers that are experiencing higher than normal flow on tributaries, which is often an annual event, will carry branches and other light debris on the surface. There'll be a fair bit of this and the river will generally be running fairly fast. Slower flowing rivers will have the odd bit of this debris.
At lower levels most rivers carry material with their flow. Even rather buoyant materials become heavy when waterlogged and slip below the surface. This certainly applies to the river in this work.
Of course there is also the bottom "sludge" layer. This layer accumulates a a very slow moving layer of earth, rotten material and heavy objects (e.g., rocks) that shifts along at a much slower pace than the rest of the river.
This particular river is mostly fed by mountain melt-water and springs, it is shown towards the end of spring. Winter storms and heavy spring run-off have cleared most of the sludge and surface debris away. For a couple of short moons it will be fairly clear and quite blue. In coming months a reduced flow and rising microbial content will turn it green.
It seems appropriate for us to represent primarily mid-level debris. We will use a technique similar to that used with the Turbulence Layer. But we will need to produce a sparser brown/green base effect.
1. Make a new white Debris Lines layer, channel to selection, grow selection 100px.
2. Default colours, Pencil Tool (Brush: Circle Fuzzy 19, Use Color From Gradient: checked, Gradient checkbox: unchecked, Length: 150 px, Repeat: Triangular).
3. Stroke selection with the pencil (emulate brush dynamics = true).
4. Shrink selection 53 (uncheck Shrink From Border). Change one or two of the Use Colour From Gradient settings (NOT the Repeat tho and limit gradients to B&W ones) AND invert the selection gradient. Then repeat 3 above. Do this until there is no selection (or close to it).
5. Create a new Debris Noise layer and fill it with medium sized (I used 8px), highest detail noise. Set this layer to non-visible.
6. Choose your Debris Lines layer and Displace (Filters->Map->Displace) it with your new noise layer. This should be a fairly small polar displace. I used Pinch: 20, Whirl: -20, Displace: Polar, Edge: Black. You may need to undo, tweak the settings and run again a couple of times to get this right.
7. Use IWarp as before if you need more warping for some line sections.
8. Create a new black layer called Debris Black just below your original Debris Lines layer.
9. Use Channel to Selection to check your lines then deselect all.
10. Run a light Gaussian Blur (5px), invert the colours on this layer, set your Debris Noise layer back to visible and change it's mode to Burn.
11. Duplicate the Debris Noise layer and set the copy's mode to Subtract.
12. Do a Layer->New From Visible. Now erode (Filters->Generic->Erode) this until there's nothing but stick-ish looking flecks. For me three times was the charm.
13. Now run an emboss (Filters->Distorts->Emboss). You want the lumps evenly textured without being too pronounced. For me Function: Emboss, Azimuth:30, Elevation: 135, Depth 10 looked right.
Well if we wanted this to be standing texture on the river we would be done. But that's not the case. We need the right colours for the debris.
14. Choose a Dark Brown foreground colour, a Light Brown background colour and Colors->Map->Gradient Map to translate the greyscale to brown.
15. Pick the Fuzzy Select tool, deselect all options except antialiasing and click on the lightest brown in the image. Fill this with 50% grey, deselect all and then run a Gaussian Blur 5px over the layer.
16. Optional. Set this Visible layer to non visible and jump back to 12, with the following changes:
- 12. Erode a couple more times than the brown debris layer.
- 14. Map to greens (dark khaki) instead of browns.
- 15. Instead of filling with 50% grey hit delete.
- Put this layer above the Visible layer and set it's opacity to 75%.
- Merge this layer down onto the Visible layer.
This gives some of your brown debris nice rotten green highlights. Especially the bigger patches of debris, which is about perfect.
17. Set the Debris working layers to non visible. Rename the Visible layer to Debris, set it's opacity to 75%, mask off the land and set the mode to Overlay.
18. At this point I was finished with the Debris working layers and deleted them. It's also worth checking if the image looks better with the Debris layer below the River Turbulence and River Bank layers. I put mine below the River Turbulence layer.
If you feel you have too much debris in one area and too little in another you can simply cut and paste on this layer to move debris around without ruining the effect. I prefer to avoid manual touch-ups, but in this case I moved five pieces of debris manually.
Well that's pretty much the river done now. Next time I'll move on to the cliffs on the inside of the main bend. Here's how it looks now...
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