Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass ~ International Institute Education

Friday 16 August 2013

Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass

Posted by Unknown On Friday, August 16, 2013

The first step-like with any entry is to gather your sources. Here are the ones I'll be using.

Next I opened the beach source. I then pasted the bottle on a layer above it. Since the background is white and the bottle has well defined edges, it was easy to create a layer mask for it using the magic wand tool (I wish it were always this easy). Once I had it masked, I applied and discarded the mask.

Since a clear object doesn't have much color of its own, it's really how it interacts with what you see through it that we will be modifying. It distorts and refracts that image. To that end, I'll be modifying the background beach scene. I've duplicated the background(beach) layer. (I've temporarily lowered the transparency of the bottle layer so I can see the background through it).Then with the beach layer active, I go to Filter-Distort-Spherize and set the value to negative to give a concave distortion. You can choose whatever value you deem appropriate. Closer objects would be less distorted and farther one maybe a bit more so since most of what is seen is pretty far away, I chose a larger number. Through the magic of Photoshop, I've pasted the result into the same window (with the bottle hidden)

Note: If you have trouble reading the settings in any of the screen shots, just click the images and they will enlarge.