Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

- J. R. R. Tolkien

Here's one hack that was inspired by another photoshop hack. (Thanks for that fatally inspirational photoshop hack go to Farlo. =)

It's kind of easy to make "puddle of water" effects, as shown below... Rain clouds from my album:

We start by making black and white mask for our operation. Below, we generate the mask from plasma; If you want to make your own mask, feel free. Just make black and white mask (use Threshold, don't anti-alias) and use white for those areas you want to be on the image, and black for those that will be left out.

1. Add new layer
2. Render plasma upon its very surface, desaturate, autostretch contrast
3. Blur at big radius
   
4. Threshold
   
5. Add layer mask to the image, copy this layer's contents to that layer mask. Invert at your peril.
   
6. Blur the original b/w layer that became the layer mask a bit and apply it to the image as a bumpmap. Or, you can make it a bit cooler, as follows:
7. Select the puddle areas (white). Magic Wand or Select By Color.
8. Shrink selection by some nice big amount (say, 10). Fill with a very light shade of grey (80% or so). Shrink from the edges should be set to off (1.1, in case your puddle extends to the edges of the image - very handy).
   
9. Select all and blur by the same amount.
10. Apply as a bumpmap.
    
    Looks kind of like dried thick paint? Reminds me of the checkerboard texture paint they supposedly paint the chess/checkerboards with in Santa's workshop... =)

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Last modified: Sat Aug 21 11:00:38 EEST 1999