Quick to Cry - Easy Water Drops

I'll demonstrate this technique by creating a teardrop, but it can be used any time you need to create a drop (or a few drops) of water. It tales just a few steps and gives you a very adaptable result.

Start by adding a new layer above the image on which you're adding the drops. In this case, I'm using a cropped and adjusted version of AbleStock's image #170910032. Next, you need to make a drop-shaped selection. You can use the Lasso tool for irregularly-shaped selections, such as water on a flat surface. I'll use the Custom Shape tool with a drop shape. In the Options Bar, I've set the tool to create a work path rather than a shape layer. (In order to make sure the following steps are clear, I've made the drop somewhat large.)

The menu commands Edit> Transform Path enable me to rotate and adjust the shape and size of the path. Remember that you can hold down the Command key (Mac) or Control (Windows) key and drag a corner of the bounding box to distort the path.

In the Paths palette, double-click on "Work Path" and name the path to save it (optional). Then, at the bottom of the Paths palette, click the button that loads the path as a selection.

Make sure that the empty layer is still selected in the Layers palette. Open the Swatches palette and click on the 45% Gray swatch to make it the foreground color. Fill the selection with the foreground color by pressing Option-Delete (Mac) or Alt-Backspace (Windows).

Deselect with Command-D (Mac) or Control-D (Windows). At the bottom of the Layers palette, click on the left-most button and select Bevel and Emboss from the pop-up menu. In the Bevel and Emboss pane of the Layer Style dialog box, set the options as follows: Inner Bevel, Smooth, Depth: 200%, Up, Size: 15, Soften: 8. In the lower part of the dialog box, the only change you need to make is to set the Highlight Opacity to 100%. Don't click OK yet.

Switch to the Stroke pane of the Layer Style dialog box by clicking on the word Stroke in the left column. (If you simply click the checkbox, the effect is applied, but the dialog box doesn't change to that pane.) Set the width to 1, position to Center, leave the blending mode as Normal, and Opacity to 50%. Click on the color swatch to open the Color Picker. In the Color Picker, change the color to RGB 118/118/118 (or type 767676 in the hexadecimal field at the bottom). That's 55% gray.

In the Layers palette, add a new empty layer and move it below the drop layer. Make the drop layer the active layer by clicking on it in the Layers palette, then from the palette's menu select Merge Down. This rasterizes the layer style along with the layer content. Change the layer's blending mode to Hard Light.

Command-click (Mac) or Control-click (Windows) on the layer's thumbnail in the Layers palette. That makes a selection of the layer content. Press Command-H (Mac) or Control-H (Windows) to hide the edges of the selection. Choose the menu command Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur. Adjust to suit, starting at about 1.5 pixels.