Ok, here is the final Video in this part of the tutorial. In this one, we use some techniques to add some extra detail to the image to give it a bit more 3D look. THANKS A TON to Torstan for giving me a few pointers of which I will go back to the original water texture layer and make a few changes.
- On the Water Texture layer, do Colors->Invert. This changes the black ripples to white ripples
- Change the mode to Hard Light
- Set the Opacity down to about 30% or so
- Next, create a new layer below the Trees, but above the undergrowth, bank and water and fill with 50% gray
- Change the mode to overlay
- With a med-large fuzzy brush, and the dodge tool selected, paint in your shadows. Pick a direction for the light to come from and imagine the places where the light would be blocked and this is where the shadows would be.
- Paint in places in the creek where you want an illusion of more depth.
- Run a Gaussian blur. I picked 100px, but you could go higher or lower to taste.
Note that this part of the tutorial is totally subjective. Just play with it until you get something you like. Another possible technique to use here would be to use the Pencil tool to add in some solid black. Perhaps switching to various gray colors or dropping the opacity as you radiate outward from the darkest parts. Likewise, you could create multiple gray layers to be able to apply different amounts of blur..... It's all up to you.
Here is the final image:
Note that I am far from a master at getting shadows right. If I really wanted to get this right, I would have spent far more then a few seconds or so as limited by the Video format. You, playing at home can spend as much time as you need to get this as nice as you can. Also, I would probably go back and add second grey layer and add a lot more darkness around the treeline for shadows. The blur step really toned that down quite a bit.
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