Add Bubbles With A Custom Bubble Brush - Page 3
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Step 13: Open Your Photo
Open the photo you want to add bubbles to. Here's the photo I'll be using:
Step 14: Add A New Blank Layer
Click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a new blank layer above the Background layer. We'll add our bubbles to this new layer so we're not making any permanent changes to the photo itself:
Step 15: Select Your Bubble Brush
Select the Brush Tool from the Tools panel if it's not already selected. With the Brush Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document and choose your bubble brush by clicking on its thumbnail in the Brush Preset picker. It should be the last brush in the list. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you're done to close out of the Brush Preset picker:
Step 16: Set The Shape Dynamics Brush Options
Press F5 on your keyboard to quickly open Photoshop's main Brushes panel, which contains all of the Brush Dynamics options that allow us to control the behavior of the brush as we paint with it. With the Brushes panel open, click directly on the words Shape Dynamics on the left of the panel. Make sure you click on the words themselves, not in the checkbox to the left of the words, otherwise we won't have access to the Shape Dynamics options:
Increase the Size Jitter to 100% by dragging the slider all the way to the right. This will give us lots of random variations in the size of the bubbles as we paint them. Do the same thing for the Roundness Jitter, increasing it to 100%, which will give us random variations in the shapes of the bubbles so they don't all look perfectly round. Finally, set the Minimum Roundness to 25%, which will prevent any of the bubbles from appearing completely flat:
Step 17: Set The Scattering Options
Click directly on the words Scattering below Shape Dynamics on the left side of the Brushes panel, then increase the Scatter amount to around 250%, which will spread the bubbles out randomly as we paint them rather than having them all appear in a straight line. Press F5 again on your keyboard when you're done to close out of the Brushes panel:
Step 18: Set Your Foreground Color To White
We're ready to paint in our bubbles! We're going to want to paint them with white, so we need to make sure our Foreground color is set to white. Since we already reset the Foreground and Background colors to their defaults earlier, which made black the Foreground color and white the Background color, all we need to do now is flip them by pressing the letter X on the keyboard, making white the Foreground color:
Step 19: Paint In The Bubbles
Your bubble brush will most likely be too big at its default size, so press the left bracket key on your keyboard a few times to make the brush smaller (the right bracket key makes the brush larger). Then, with Layer 1 selected in the Layers panel, simply paint in your bubbles. For best results, paint in short strokes from the bottom of the photo to the top and leave some space between the strokes to create clusters of bubbles. If you're not happy with how the bubbles look, press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) to undo the last brush stroke, or Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) to undo multiple strokes, then try again. Here's my image after painting in my initial bubbles. I used a very small brush to create the main bubble columns, then a slightly larger brush to add in a few random larger ones:
Step 20: Duplicate The Bubbles Layer
At the moment, the bubbles look a little too crisp and sharp compared with the rest of the underwater image, so let's give them more of a mirky underwater glow. Press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to quickly duplicate the bubbles layer:
Step 21: Apply The Gaussian Blur Filter
Go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, then choose Gaussian Blur:
When the Gaussian Blur dialog box appears, increase the Radius value to around 8 px:
Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. The blur adds a glow around the bubbles that helps them blend in better with the mirky water:
As an optional last step, add another new blank layer to the document by clicking on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, then use a larger size brush to add a couple of additional columns of bubbles. The larger bubbles will appear to be closer to the viewer than the smaller bubbles. Finally, press Ctrl+F (Win) / Command+F (Mac) to re-apply the Gaussian Blur filter, which will completely blur out the bubbles as if they're too close for the viewer's eyes to focus on them. Here, I've added a blurred bubble column on either side of the diver:
And there we have it!
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