Again, I have resorted to Photoshop trickery to create the illusion of a red hibiscus bloom and its rippled reflection for this week’s Sunday Post: Reflection challenge. The original photograph is of a bloom of a hibiscus growing wild at the water’s edge near us.
The process is a little more involved than things I have posted recently such as Liquid Bamboo or Orchid Merge. This time I opened the original hibiscus image in Photoshop and selected and copied just the bloom. After opening a new file I applied a black background fill layer and pasted the selected bloom on to the background in a separate layer. I rotated the bloom a little and selected and copied it again. This copy was pasted on to another file with a black background fill layer as before. The file was then “flattened” and flipped vertically (image|image rotation|flip vertically) to create the “reflection.” A wave filter was applied (filter|distort|wave). Just the wave distorted bloom was selected, copied and pasted into a new layer just below the original bloom on the black background. A little cropping and nudging of the reflected image will probably be necessary. The finished image was then returned to Lightroom for a final cropping.
And there you have a hibiscus with its watery reflection.

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adinparadise
4 Sep 2012Very clever trickery, Ron. 🙂
fotograffer
5 Sep 2012Thanks 🙂
Lynn Sarda
4 Sep 2012Your cleverness is resulting in loveliness.
Sent from my iPad
fotograffer
5 Sep 2012Thank you Lynn.
jakesprinter
4 Sep 2012Excellent work for this week topic ,Thanks for sharing my friend 🙂
fotograffer
5 Sep 2012Thanks to you Jake.
snowbirdpress
5 Sep 2012Hibiscus…one of my all time favorite flowers… We used to have white ones with red centers and they were large as dinner plates! It was a sight to behold when they bloomed.
fotograffer
6 Sep 2012They are my favorites as well. Always eager to put on their show!
ManoliRizoFotografia
6 Sep 2012¡Me encanta!, buenísimo el procesado!!, aquí también tenemos muchos hibiscus, yo la tuve en mi jardín, la quité porque se puso enferma, abrazos
fotograffer
6 Sep 2012Gracias. Las enfermedades son un problema con hibiscus aquí demasiado. Este uno crece en forma silvestre y parece estar sano.
ManoliRizoFotografia
8 Sep 2012Pues sí por eso tuve que quitar el mío, murió de una enfermedad, ya no los he vuelto a plantar
drawandshoot
7 Sep 2012Tricky, and highly effective!