Water-walking Dog With Reflection (Exclusive Tutorial)

I am sure you've seen plenty tutorials that describe the process of creating simple reflections on a simple background. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to put this useful technique into practice, but on a more advanced level.

So, I decided to depict a dog walking on water. I hope I'm not offending anyone by this playful blasphemy. I think dogs should get their share of sublime, be it in real life or just in a Photoshop tutorial.

To implement my idea, I needed two pictures: a landscape with water and a dog. The water should be as smooth as glass so that it reflects objects well. The dog should be full size and in motion. Having done some minor searching, I found a suitable landscape easily:

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and a fitting dog :

For starters, let's extract the dog from the background - get rid of all the superfluous details. This is done using the Extract tool. Read this tutorial if you don't know how to use extract tool. Now open the dog in Photoshop and extract it. This is what you should get after the extraction:

Open the landscape in Photoshop and drag the layer with the dog upon that with the landscape. Using Free Transform and holding down the Shift button, change the dog's dimensions. After that, drag it somewhere into the center of the lake upon a clear surface.

Duplicate the dog layer, flip it vertical and then using the Move tool drag it downward so that the dog's paws touch.

As this a reflection, it should not be as bright. Set opacity to 50% and Blending Mode to Multiply.

So, we've got a dog with a reflection, but they look obviously out of place here, and not only due to the fact the dog is walking on water. The color palettes differ too much, so we have to fix this. Select the layer with the original dog (not the reflection) and apply Match Color to it. Set the Source: your psd, Layer: Background. You can play around with the image options to achieve my result, or simply use the settings below.

Much better now. Choose the layer with the dog's shadow and apply Match color again. Use the same settings as in the previous operation. Or you can use slightly other settings in the Image Options, like I did.

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Basically, the dog walking on water is done. Something's missing, though. I'm not sure about you, but I associate those walking on water with saints, and the saints, in turn, with halos. A halo is what we can grant our dog with.

Create a new layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool, select an ellipse over the dog's head.

Apply stroke with the following settings:

Apply Guassian Blur to the halo and set the radius to 2.9px.

Set Blending Mode: Luminosity and Opacity: 30-40%. After that, Duplicate the layer and change Blending Mode in the new layer to Pin Light.

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One thing here still disturbs me - the glass-kind smoothness of the water surface. However saintly the dog may be, it still touches the water while walking on it, so there should be ripples.

Select Background Layer. Then using the Elliptical Marquee tool, select an ellipse under the dog's front paw.

Apply Zig-Zag with the following settings:

Deselect. After that, select a larger area under the hind paw and apply Zig-Zag again (Ctrl+F).

This is what I got:

Click to enlarge