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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