Compositing lakes!

[LudioB]

Hi,
Assistance on compositing lakes of specific shapes onto terrain in aerial photos.
Does anybody have any guidance on how some one would have compositied these lake feet shapes into this image?

 

[thebestcpu]

Hi @LudioB
With a near-vertical view, the lake's reflection is almost a straight-up look into the sky.
I suggest doing an image search on Google for aerial views of lakes; it will give you many ideas on what to change.
Just my quick thoughts.
John Wheeler

 

[Rich54]

Does anybody have any guidance on how some one would have compositied these lake feet shapes into this image?

I believe you are asking how something like this was done in Photoshop. If so, then the question probably belongs in the General Photoshop forum. That said, there are several ways to do it. Here's one way that's fairly easy.

• You need a brush that can produce jagged edges. Photoshop contains a series of Chalk brushes that will work, and there are likely to be several others.
• Open the Brush Shape Dynamics panel and set the size jitter all the way up. That will accentuate the jaggedness.
• Create a new layer above your aerial photo and set the layer style to a Drop Shadow with settings similar to what's shown below. You can experiment with these settings.

• Once you've got all of that initial setup completed, select the foreground color of your choice and draw footprints, or any other shape.
• Here's what I get when I drew the third lake, on the far left.
• Note that the perfectly flat blue color has no glints or reflections and is not very realistic, in my opinion. But it matches the sample you provided fairly closely.