Summary: Give waterfalls a silky smooth appearance without the need for any fancy photo filters or longer exposures.

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we're going to look at how to give waterfalls a silky smooth appearance, as if the photo was taken with a longer exposure which would normally require the use of a neutral density filter.

Here's the photo I'll be starting with:

And here's the finished "silky smooth" effect:

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Let's get started!

Step 1: Draw A Selection Around The Waterfall

With your image open in Photoshop, grab your Lasso Tool from the Tools palette:

You can also press the letter L on your keyboard to quickly select it.

Then, with the Lasso tool selected, drag a selection around your waterfall. It doesn't have to be surgically precise, but try not to stray too far from the edges of the waterfall:

Step 2: Copy the Selection Onto Its Own Layer

With the waterfall selected, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to copy it onto its own layer above the Background layer. You won't see anything happen in the document window, but if you look in the Layers panel, you'll see the waterfall on a new layer:

Step 3: Apply The Motion Blur Filter To The New Layer

With our waterfall now copied to its own layer, we can create our "silky smooth" effect by applying the Motion Blur filter to it. To do that, go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, select Blur, and then select Motion Blur. This brings up the Motion Blur dialog box:

Adjust the Angle of the blur so it matches the angle at which the water is falling. In most cases, this would be 90°, since water would normally fall straight down. In my case, since the water is rushing so quickly over the edge, it's actually falling at a bit of an angle, so I've set my blur angle to -77°. The easiest way to match your blur angle to the water is to click inside the Angle value box and then increase or decrease the value one degree at a time using the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard, which is what I've done.

Once you've set the correct angle, drag the Distance slider at the bottom until your waterfall looks nice and silky. I've dragged mine to a value of 73 pixels, which gives me a nice effect.

Here's my image after applying the Motion Blur filter: