Photo Effects: Add Realistic Water Drops To A Photo

Step 8: Select All The Black Areas With The Magic Wand

Now that we have the shapes which will become our water drops (the black areas), we can delete all the areas we no longer need (the white areas). First, let's select the black areas. To do that, we'll use the Magic Wand. Select it from the Tools palette, or press W on your keyboard to quickly select it:

Then, with the Magic Wand selected, look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen and make sure the Contiguous option is not checked. We want to select all the black areas with a single click, and if this option was selected, we'd have to go around clicking on each black area individually to add it to the selection. So with "Contiguous" not checked, simply click on any black area in the image with the Magic Wand and Photoshop will select all of them at once:

Step 9: Invert The Selection And Delete The White Areas

Currently we have all of the black areas selected, but what we really want is to have all the white areas selected so we can delete them. All we need to do is invert our selection, which will select everything that is not currently selected and deselect everything that is selected. In other words, the white areas will become selected and the black areas will be deselected. To do that, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I (Win) / Command+Shift+I (Mac). All the white areas will now be selected.

Then press Delete on your keyboard to delete all the white areas, leaving only the black shapes. Press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to deselect your selection when you're done:

Step 10: Lower The "Fill" Of The Black Shapes Layer To 0%

In the top left corner of the Layers palette, you'll find two options - "Opacity" and "Fill". Both of these options control the visibility of a layer, with one important difference. If you were to lower the "Opacity" of a layer down to 0%, you would hide not only the contents of the layer but also any layer styles that were applied to it. The "Fill" option, on the other hand, would hide only the layer contents. Any layer styles applied to the layer would remain visible, and that's exactly what we want in order to create our water drops effect. We want to hide the actual black shapes themselves, but we want the layer styles, which we'll be applying next, to remain visible. So to do that, go up to the Fill option in the top right corner of the Layers palette and lower it all the way down to 0%:

Your black shapes will disappear from view in your image, but don't worry, they're still there, and we're going to be applying our layer styles to them next.

Step 11: Add A Drop Shadow Layer Style

Click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Choose Drop Shadow from the list of layer styles that appears:

This brings up the Layer Style dialog box set to the "Drop Shadow" options in the middle column. Lower the Opacity of the drop shadow down to about 40% and set the Angle to about 120°:

Don't click OK yet. We have a couple more layer styles to add first.