Written by Steve Patterson. In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we'll learn how to easily add realistic looking water ripples to an image! Photoshop ships with a filter designed specifically for creating a water ripple effect, but you'd never know it from the filter's name (no, it's not Ripple or Ocean Ripple, that would be too easy). The filter we'll be using does a decent job on its own, but as we'll see in this tutorial, by running the filter twice, using different settings each time, then combining the results, we can create a more realistic water ripple effect.

I'll be using Photoshop CS5 throughout this tutorial but any recent version will work. Here's the image I'll be starting with:

Here's how it will look after adding some ripples to the water, as if raindrops are falling on the surface:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Select The Elliptical Marquee Tool

The first thing we need to do is draw a selection around the area where the water ripple will appear. Since water ripples are elliptical, we'll use an elliptical selection tool. Select Photoshop's Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools panel. By default, it's nested behind the Rectangular Marquee Tool so click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool's icon and hold your mouse button down for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears, then select the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the menu:

Step 2: Drag Out An Elliptical Selection

With the Elliptical Marquee Tool selected, drag out an elliptical selection where you want the first water ripple to appear in the image. Try to match the shape of the selection to the perspective of the image so that water ripples closer to you will appear more circular than ripples further off in the distance:

Step 3: Make Two Copies Of The Selected Area

With the selection outline in place, press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) on your keyboard twice to make two copies of the selected area (you can also go up to the Layer menu, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy twice, but the keyboard shortcut is much faster). Each copy will be added to its own layer in the Layers panel. The top layer will be selected (highlighted in blue):

Step 4: Turn Off The Top Layer Temporarily

We need to hide the top layer for the moment, so click on its layer visibility icon (the eyeball) on the far left of the layer in the Layers panel, which will temporarily hide the layer from view in the document window:

Step 5: Select The Layer Below It

With the top layer now hidden, click on the layer below it in the Layers panel to select it:

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Step 6: Load A Selection Around The Layer's Contents

Hold down your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and click directly on the layer's preview thumbnail in the Layers panel:

This places a selection outline around the contents of the layer in the document, which means the selection outline you drew a moment ago will reappear. The reason we're loading the selection outline before choosing the filter, which we'll be doing next, is to limit the filter's effect to the area inside the selection, otherwise Photoshop would apply it to the entire image:

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