nyssabrowndesign

I personally love reflections. They can add flavour to a design, so long as it isn’t overused. This tutorial will teach anyone how to create a simple and straight forward reflection.

For this particular tutorial, I’m going to use the WordPress logo as example. You can follow using the same logo, which you can get at factorycity.net. Get the 128px png image, which is what I’m using here.

I’ve used Photoshop CS3 to do this particular reflection, but it will be the same for most lower versions of Photoshop.

So first things first, open the WordPress logo up in Photoshop. You’ll notice it’s a png, which means it will more or less just be one layer. This makes it even easier to work with. Now that you have it open in Photoshop, you’ll want to extend the canvas to make the height double what it is. You can do this by going to Edit > Canvas Size and changing the height of the canvas:

As you can see in the image to the left, doubling the canvas size is fairly straight forward. Change height to 256px, and select the top middle arrow so it looks the same as in my screenshot. Press okay and you’ll have an extended canvas to work with.

Next, duplicate the logo so you will have two layers of the same icon. Go to the layers window, right click “Layer 0″ and Duplicate. You’ll now have two layers: Layer 0 and Layer 0 copy. Right click “Layer 0 copy” and rename it to “Reflection” (if you like, rename “Layer 0″ to “WP Logo”).

At this point, you need to flip the “Reflection” layer vertically. Do this by going to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical (last in the list). The “Reflection” layer will now be upside down, as if it were reflected. Obviously though, it’s needs to be moved into position below the original logo. Move it down so that it’s just touching the bottom of the original logo, like the screenshot on the right. As you can see, it’s looking like a mirrored image, only it’s not looking like a reflection yet. Let’s get to that now.

In the layers window once again, adjust the opacity of the “Reflection” layer. The transparency really depends on the individual, but for the sake of this tutorial, let’s drop the opacity to 20%.

This makes the logo that transparent, it’s barely visible on the checkered background in Photoshop. Not to worry though, because it will look different once it has a solid colour behind it. (I’ve added a background colour to mine at this, so you can see how it looks and so I can see what I’m doing. To do this, just add a new layer, move it below the two existing layers and fill it with whatever colour you please - white is generally good enough):

At this point, you could leave the reflection layer alone and have a very bland and straight reflection, but let’s move on a little further to make the reflection even better. Use the Eraser: soft brush at about the size of 100. Drop the opacity of the brush to 50%, and erase the bottom half of the reflection layer, until it looks something like my final image (left - see it with a white background)

The whole process is very straight forward and once you’ve done it a couple of times, it’s a breeze. There are probably plenty of other ways of creating reflections but I have found this is my most favourite way of doing it, due to the control I have over the look of the reflection. Once you’ve practised, you can try on other images, even photographs.

For those of you that like to see .psd’s themselves, you can download it to check it out. You’ll be able to see the layers properly (not that there is a lot to it) and play with the opacity within my .psd file. Lazy people may enjoy this .psd too. ;)

WordPress Logo source: factorycity.net