Image Retouching 101: Enhancing Your Images With The Reflection Tool

Reflections can add depth and realism to any photo. Creating reflections may seem hard at first but once you learn how to do it step by step, you would be able to know how easy it actually is. Adding reflections is the best way to enhance any dull photos and breathes in new life to it. In less than 15 minutes, you would be able to use the basics of the Reflection Tool by following the steps provided below.

Crop, Copy, Paste

The first thing that we would do is to crop the image that you want to use and then copy it in a new layer. There are 2 easy ways to copy your photo. One is to use the lasso tool (this tool is useful for complex images); another is using the “marquee tool”. The Marquee Tool is particularly useful for pictures that are simple like a building structure. Choose the Marquee Tool and draw a box around the image. Right click on the image and choose the “layer via copy” to copy the selected image to the present layer.

Only do this step once. The selected image will be on top of the original photo. To check, you can drag the copied image down to see the original one.

Flip the Image

While still remaining on the new layer, click on the “Edit” button and from there choose the “Transform” and the “Flip Vertical” to turn the copied image upside down. It might look weird but this would actually serve as the reflection of the original. Move the upside down image below the actual picture until the original image and the flipped image aligns. To reduce the gap between the two, you can use the up and down buttons of the keyboard to adjust the image.

Blending

Reflections should not look like the original image and as such, we would need to blend the flipped image. The color blending is always set at normal as a default but you can change it to lighten or darken the flipped image. A graph is also shown on the right side of your work area which you can move to adjust the color from dark to light and vice versa. You can play around and choose the best one that would work out for you. Remember to save your work progress to ensure that all your works are retained. Saved images can be in .PDF, .BMP, or .JPEG formats.