Easy & Realistic Water Reflection Animation in Photoshop

Some of the most beautiful digital art is animated. And if we want to continue down the line, some of the most beautiful animations include that slowly rippling water effect that you can find rarely - and always remember when you do. The problem is that there aren't any settings or filters within Photoshop that create realistic water ripples. You can come close, but the moment it's going to be animated, things start going .... strange.

I'll never be able to explain why I insist on trying out things in Photoshop. I experiment over and over for months on end if necessary until I can end up with precisely the effect I was after. I think it must be the challenge - Adobe Photoshop isn't the easiest thing in the world to learn, but once you get the basics down it's so addictive. There's always some new way to push and stretch your design skills within the program.

So, in this Photoshop tutorial, I'll be sharing how to create some very easy - and beautifully realistic - water reflections and animate them. You don't have to know a lot about Photoshop to use this guide, I'll explain things pretty clearly.

What do you need?

1. A photograph or graphic you want to animate
2. Photoshop 7 or higher (the illustrations use Photoshop CS2)
3. A third-party program called Sqirlz Reflection, which you can download for free here from c|net.

And with that, let's dive right in - this won't take long at all.

Part One: Preparing the Image in Photoshop

Before we can animate the image, we need to have something to actually animate. I suppose there could be something that you'd want to animate the entire image ... but it won't look as nice as what we're going to do. So, open your image in Photoshop.