How to Render Rippling Water

Filters aren't very useful for creating realistic waves and whirlpools, but they can create very neat-looking rendered bodies of water. These images will never pass for the real thing, but they are still great to look at. By using spinning blur features and chrome, random pixels can be transformed into something that looks liquid.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Photoshop

Instructions

Rendering Rippling Water

1. 

   Set the foreground color to a light blue and the background color to white. Apply the Clouds filter.

2. 

   Apply the ocean ripple with the ripple size at 9 and the ripple magnitude at 9. Run the Chrome filter with detail set at 4 and smoothness set at 5.

3. 

   Run the radial blur at an amount of 20 with the method at Spin.

4. 

   Apply the chrome filter with the detail of 4 and the smoothness of 5.

5. 

   Use the hue/saturation program under the Adjustments part of the image drop-down menu to change the color of the image. Click the Colorize checkbox and play with the hue and saturation.

Tips & Warnings

• If you want, you can use hue/saturation at Step 2 and leave the image the way it is.