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How can i make these beautiful reflections?


Tom Mann

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Hi Pickone -

I'm running around like crazy today, but will give you a full explanation of the method I used either late tonight or early tomorrow AM, east coast USA time.

In the meantime, here are a couple of quick answers to your questions:

a) I didn't use any plugin(s), no cloning, no healing brush, no content aware fill based on the existing "real" reflections, or anything like that. I simply cut out an area (above the shoreline, including the sky) that I was interested in, flipped and re-positioned it (as everyone else did), and followed that by my own mix of techniques (that I'll describe later tonight). Other than eyeballing the surrounding areas to visually match brightness, color, lengths of the stretched blurs, etc. I made absolutely no use of the surrounding "real" reflections.

b) re: "TJM simulated" - "TJM" is my initials; "simulated" refers to the fact that these were the ones I constructed "from zero". On the annotated version that I posted, I needed a short caption to distinguish which reflections were "mine" (ie, that I constructed from zero), and which areas were the "real" reflections (ie, that appeared in your original photograph). I wanted to have my simulated reflections be directly alongside the real ones so that they could be easily compared.

c) You keep mentioning displacement maps. FYI, my technique does not use these.

d) Your photo has a small, but significant amount of lens flare around each bright light. This is most easily seen as the circular halo that surrounds the red lights on the smokestacks. For a reason which I'll explain later, it turns out that this is what causes simulated reflections to be slightly wider (left-right) than the real reflections. I did not deal with this in the image I already posted, but for full realism, it should be taken into account. After we discuss the basics, if you want, I can show you how to deal with this as well.

More later,

Tom
 

IamSam

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Interesting Tom, looking forward to reading about your technique.
 

pickone

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Tom, I can't wait to find out your technique. I'm always open to find a quicker one or better than what i'm achieving. One more question, can you make even the light reflections so bright/real like in the original photo? If you can make both things possible, it will be 100% replicating the original photo, absolutely outstanding.
 
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Tom Mann

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Hey, Pickone - I haven't forgotten you, but I spend all day yesterday seeing departing guests off, picking up new house guests at the airport, etc. Today, I've got some oral surgery that I've been able to postpone till what I thought would be a break in my schedule -- ha. Anyway, I'll try to write up my method tonight and post it. Sorry for the delay.

Cheers,

Tom
 

pickone

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Hi! No problem, do your job, i will wait for you ;) Hey, but... what are you doing in the airport with such photoshop skills? :D

Cheers!
 
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Tom Mann

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Hey, Pickone - I haven't yet had time to write up an explaination of the steps I used, but I figured that I would at least post the major intermediate steps in the process now, and write up the full explanation later today or tomorrow of exactly how I simulated the reflections.

To get a good match, as I mentioned before, I had to take into account that there were pixels with blown channels in the direct light from the buildings. In contrast, because of the low reflectivity of the water, and the scattering from the ripples/waves, there was much less of a problem with blown channels in the reflections. My work-around for this problem is to partition the problem into dealing separately with the reflections from bright light sources, and then separately from the weaker light sources. It works to some degree, but it isn't perfect.

Also, to facilitate comparison of my simulated reflections with the real reflections in your photo, I left all my work in the upper half of the frame (ie, I never bothered to flip it), and, in the last of the attached images, turned on the real reflections in the lower half of the frame. If my technique was completely successful, the upper and lower halves would be mirror images of each other. However, as I mentioned earlier, while the bulk of the simulated reflections are not too far off, for reasons that I don't understand, there are quite a few odd discrepancies scattered around in the image -- the discrepancies are glaringly obvious when presented this way. If anyone has any ideas about what might have caused these when everything else is working pretty well, I'm all ears.

Later today or tomorrow, I'll write up the details.

Cheers,

Tom

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#1 - Your original photo (reproduced for easy, nearby, comparison).

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-01_orig_photo.jpg
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#2 - My attempt to reduce some of the lens flare and blown pixels to produce a better starting point. Because of all the subsequent blurring involved, this doesn't have to be particularly good looking, just sharper.

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-02_reduce_blooming_blown_pix.jpg
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#3 - Vertical blurring of the darker tones in the image.

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-03_dark_blurs_only.jpg
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#4 - Vertical blurring of the brighter tones in the image.

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-04_blur_lights_only.jpg

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#5 - Combination of #3 and #4 (using the "lighten" layer blend mode)

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-05_combo_of_blur_lights_and_darks.jpg

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#6 - Add some slight ripples in some areas. I didn't have any good example photos to pull full-width ripples from, so, I just stretched out my patterns horizontally to fill this frame, which leads to an obvious, overly regular look, but it's better than nothing.

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-06_slight_ripples.jpg

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#7 - The final comparison between my simulated reflections (upper half) and the reflections in your photo (lower half).

123-tjm02-acr-ps03a_sRGB_8bpc-final_layers_for_tut-07_sim_above_real_refl_below.jpg

Gotta run. More later.

Tom
 

IamSam

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The anticipation is killing me! :rofl:

Tom.......the wait is brutal! LOL!!
 

Tom Mann

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Hold your horses, guys. :lol:

There's quite a few steps, so I want to write it up when I won't be interrupted (and probably make a mistake).

:cheers:

T
 

pickone

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Dude, you are awesome! I have a little simple request to you. Will be more easy for you to make and to us for understanding better you technique. PLEASE, but very PLEASE :) make a video screen recording in photoshop with of all your steps! I think all of us will greatly appreciate.

Thank you in advance!
 
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Tom Mann

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I appreciate the idea, but sorry, Pickone, but I don't do video tuts.

Don't worry, you'll get a nice set of instructions, and I'll be around to answer any questions that might come up.

T
 

pickone

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Hi, Tom!

I have a question about the step 3 that you already posted, can you please tell me:

- step 2#, i understand... a sharpness, that's is ok

- step #3, how you've made the vertical blurring, with what filter? and... what was your technique for blurring dark tones separately from brighter tones? How do you separate the image in two zones?

Thank you!
 

Tom Mann

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You are asking exactly the right questions! Let me answer them in order of increasing difficulty.

1. Separating the image into bright and non-bright tonal ranges

The separation into two tonal ranges is easy. To do this, you're going to make a contrasty luminosity map (and it's inverse). First, put a couple of "brightness/contrast" adjustment layers on top of the sharpened image. Set the opacity of both to around 70%, and move the contrast slider in both up to about 60%. Put a "Black & White" conversion adjustment layer on top of that. I find the "maximum white" preset works the best for luminosity maps that you want to use to emphasize the lights in a cityscape.

You now have a high contrast B&W image. Go to the "Channels" palette and make a couple of new channels. Copy the high contrast B&W image that you just made into one of them and label it something like, "brights". Go back to the high contrast B&W image, invert it, and copy the result into the 2nd channel u just made. Label it something like, "non-brights". These are the two luminosity masks that you need.

Now, go back to the full color, normal contrast, but sharpened original. Make a couple of copies of it. Put one of the luminosity masks on one of the copies and the other mask on the 2nd copy. "Apply" each of the masks. Label these: "sharpened - brites only", and "sharpened - non brights". These two partially transparent layers are exactly what you need for the next step, the blurring.


2. Blurring the above two partially transparent layers

As you know, doing this well is the most critical step.

First, try a little separate experiment. In a new separate PS document, make a dark blue background, and put a hard edged, small (20 px) circular bright red dot on it. Apply some vertical motion blur to it, say 200 pixels. The result is a faint, weakly red line 20 px wide, more or less uniformly intense for around 100 px on either side of the original bright red dot. You can play with this all you want using contrast, levels, saturation and other such tools, but because the original total red content has been spread out over this much larger area, you will never get the nice bright streaks like in the real world reflections.

The way around this is to put the red dot or other object to be turned into a streak on its own layer and work on it there. So, try another experiment. This time, put the hard edged (20 px) circular, intensely red dot on its own layer (with a blue background layer underneath), and apply motion blur to the former. Unfortunately, the result will still look the same as it did before (ie, very weakly red), but now that it's on its own layer, you can do something about it. In this case, the red dot is mixing with the surrounding transparent pixels, so after blurring, its peak opacity is greatly reduced, but now, it can be boosted back up.

To do this, go to the "layers" pull down menu and click on, "layer mask / from transparency". This will turn the opacity information in this nearly transparent layer into a layer mask which you can manipulate. For example, temporarily disable the layer mask, and you see the motion blurred spot at 100% opacity, ie, really bright, but very hard edged all the way around. This is too much. It will destroy detail when applied to city lights. So, instead of completely disabling the layer mask, apply a levels transformation to make the most opaque pixels in the mask 100% opaque instead of just a few percent opaque. To do this, select the layer mask, go to "image/adjustments/levels", and move the RH slider that's just below the histogram well to the left. Now, you have a nice bright red line with soft transitions at its edges, much more appropriate for city lights.

The only remaining problem w.r.t. blurring is that you don't want each light to be turned into a uniformly bright line -- you want each line to fade out towards its ends. The way to do this is to apply the procedure described in the preceding paragraph many times, but with much smaller motion blur radius at each step.

For the example I posted, I set the motion blur radius to several pixels, ie, about the width of each light source. I then applied motion blur at this radius around 5 times (...just use cntrl-F to quickly reapply it multiple times), and then went through the routine described above to recover the opacity that's being spread out. As I recall, I went through about 4 or 5 sets of the above, each set containing 5 reps of motion blur followed by the opacity recovery procedure.

BTW, one can probably increase the motion blur radius with each set, and reduce the total number of motion blur steps, so you might want to experiment with this, but make sure you are still getting nice tapered blurs, not with hard ends.

For your water reflection image, I only had to use the opacity recovery procedure (described above) when I was blurring the "sharpened - brites only" layer. For the "sharpened - non brights" layer, I got nice results using only multiple applications of motion blur at relatively small radius without interspersing any of the opacity recovery steps.

3. Final tweaks.

After merging the results of motion blurring the two tonal ranges, the colors, brightness and contrast were slightly off, so, as I recall, I added a few (global) adjustment layers at the very end of the process to yield the image I posted previously.

HTH,

Tom
 

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