Visitor request: Advanced reflections in Photoshop

This tutorial has been requested by a Tip-Kit visitor, but i'm sure others will find it useful as well. If you are in need of a guide or a tutorial, you can also request it and possibly have it written especially for you.

One of our visitors wanted to know how he could create an advanced reflection of a laptop computer. Unfortunatelly, the problem with reflections of advanced objects is that every object requires slightly different techniques for reflecting it and some objects won't reflect at all. Generally, you can only fake a reflection, but it still won't look 100% real. What is an advanced reflection anyway? To answer that, let's first look at what a very simple reflection is. Look at the images below:

As you can see a simple reflection is simply a flipped original with some fading applied. But let's apply the same technique to a more complex object:

If you have any sence of reality, you'll notice that the reflection on the right is simply ridiculous. Try putting a laptop on any surface anyway you want it and it will still not reflect like that. In this tutorial i'll show you how to fake a reflection on this very laptop. You won't be able to use the same technique on all the objects you want to reflect (some of them are practically impossible to reflect in Photoshop at all) but you will still have one weapon more in your arsenal.

Faking the reflection

The laptop i used for this tutorial can be found here. If you want to cut the laptop out of the background yourself, follow the next tip or scroll down a little and you'll find a link to a PSD file with the job already done. So to cut it yourself: open the image in Photoshop, grab the pen tool

from the tools palette, and make a selection around the laptop with these settings defined:

Right click inside the selected area, choose Make Selection ... and finally press CTRL+J to put the laptop on a separate layer. The reason i'm not giving any visual feedback or more details on this operation is because this is not the purpose of this tutorial. If you fail to cut the laptop or you're simply a little lazy, download the psd i used: it already has the laptop cut out on a new layer. The PSD has a background (not entirely white) and a laptop on a new layer:

So let's begin faking the reflection. Unfortunately, this method is not a very easy one, but unless you photograph the objects on a reflective surface yourself - this is all you've got. OK we'll be using the polygonal lasso tool

from the tools palette a lot so grab it and let's continue. The key in advanced reflections is reflecting the image piece by piece. You cannot just flip it and expect to reflect perfectly. You need to process each side of the object separately. So with the polygonal lasso tool, make a selection like this:

Now select the laptop layer and press CTRL+J to put the contents of the selection onto a new layer. Name that layer sides. We will be creating the reflections of both sides separately, but we'll do it on a single layer. Move the sides layer below the laptop layer. Now go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical and position the flipped part below the laptop like this:

To be able to see things more clear, select both layers and move them up so that the flipped part is completely visible:

Let's reflect the left part first. To do that, make a selection with a rectangular marquee tool

like the one below:

Now select Edit > Transform > Skew from the menu and drag the left side of the transformation upwards until the reflection transforms as shown below

Press ENTER to apply and make a selection of the right side:

Once again, select the skew tool (Edit > Transform > Skew) and this time drag the right side upwards until the reflection transforms as follows:

After pressing ENTER and deselecting everything, you should have something like that:

Select both sides and laptop layers and move them down to center in the document once again:

As you can see, there's a part of the reflection that wouldn't be visible in the real world and we will now select and delete it. Grab the polygonal lasso tool

from the tools palette. You need to get rid of the part within the red border:

To do that, simply make a rough selection like this and press DEL (remember to select the sides layer before deleting):

Now you should have a fairly decent thing that you could call a reflection:

We will still need to add a display's reflection and a shadow to make it look better. Let's add a shadow first. Create a new layer above the background and name it shadow. Select it and draw a selection like the one below:

Press D for default color values and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the selection with black. Deselect with CTRL+D. You probably won't see anything happen just now but don't worry about it. Next, apply a 7-8 pixel Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur .... At this point i've realised the layer order was incorrect so to fix this, move the shadow layer above the sides layer. And you will start seeing a more dramatic effect:

Now change the opacity of the shadow layer to about 50%. This looks better at least for me so if for you it doesn't - keep it at an opacity of your choice. Next, select the laptop layer and make a selection of a display:

CTRL+J the display onto a new layer and name it display or monitor etc. Now move the display layer below the laptop, do a vertical flip (Edit > Transform > Flip Vertically) and align it with the laptop like this:

If we leave it as it is now, the reflection will not look real at all so we still need to transform the monitor a little. Press Edit > Transform > Skew and drag the bottom line to the left until the right side of the display's reflection becomes a straight vertical line:

As you can see, the reflections we did earlier are missing from the picture above. That's because i've hidden them for now, but you don't need to do that. Press ENTER to apply and once again activate the skew tool to apply another transformation. This time make the horizontal lines of display's reflection parallel to the horizontal lines of the original picture. Basically, drag the left side upwards as shown below:

Now we need to fade the monitor out. Add a layer mask on the display layer by pressing the layer mask button

in the layers panel. Now grab a gradient tool

from the tools palette and use these settings:

Draw a line like shown below:

Now right-click on the layer mask thumbnail and select Apply Layer Mask. You should now have a nice fade like this:

Once again, i have my sides layer disabled and that's why you're not seeing any reflection of the sides in a few images above. Next thing to do is move the sides layer above the display and merge them together CTRL+E. Here's how it looks now with all reflections enabled:

Finally, change the opacity of the merged layer to about 70%-80% and you have the final reflection of a complex object:

In some cases the method described above is not enough. Sometimes you need to paint some details manually, clone some existing stuff or even use a liquify filter. It's a creative process, in some cases it takes lots of effort, in some - not so much. The ideal way is to probably photograph the objects yourself on a reflective surface and even if you don't have one - you can still take a picture of an object and another picture of it flipped and combine them in photoshop. Unfortunately the latter method is probably even more difficult, because you cannot easily take two matching pictures to be able to create a reflection from ... especially with a laptop case :) This method would work with more simple objects like books and other primitive objects. So if you really want realistic reflections, you can: a) do it in Photoshop if you have an ideal image; b) take a picture on a reflective surface yourself; c) use a 3d software to create a model of the object instead of using a real one.

Have fun and i hope you've learned something new today.