How To Add Water Reflection to an Image Using GIMP!

Final output

Hey there!

In the previous article, I demonstrated How to Make a Reflection Effect in GIMP. If you missed it don’t worry, click here to read that article.

Today I am going to demonstrate how to do a water reflection with gimp.

For this tutorial, I am using GIMP 2.10.30 version.

So, Let’s Get Started!

Step 01:

Open GIMP, drag and drop the image, or by clicking on the file then in the drop-down menu click open, select the image and you’re ready to go.

Image 01

Step 02:

Add an alpha channel to the image if it doesn’t have one already. To do that, head over to the layer panel, right-click on the layer on which the image is on and click Add Alpha Channel.

Image 02

Step 03:

Duplicate the layer by clicking the duplicate button in the bottom tab or right-click on the layer on which the image is on and click on the duplicate layer option.

Image 03

Step 04:

Then resize the height of the image.

Click Image -> Canvas Size

In the Canvas Size tab, change the height to double the previous height value, fill it with transparency, and click Resize button. [In my case change the height to 1,536 (768 * 2).]

Image 04

Step 05:

Then rotate the duplicated image using the flip tool and drag the flipped image and move it downwards.

Image 05 and Image 06

Step 06:

Then give the bottom portion a slight blur by clicking Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian blur.

Image 07

Step 07:

Then give a motion blur going at a vertical by clicking Filters -> Blur -> Linear Motion Blur and set the angle as 90.00 and the length as around 40.

Image 08

Step 08:

If we’re noticing clearly, some of the backgrounds are shown in the bottom portion of the image. So we have to eliminate that.

So, using the move tool we can move the bottom portion, and using the crop tool you can cut out the unwanted area of your image.

Image 09

Step 09:

Then grab the Warp transform tool and move the bottom image around a bit.

Image 10

Step 10:

Then I want to create a new layer and add more effects to that layer.

So first, add a new layer on the layer panel fill it with transparency, and fill that new layer with black. So do that go Edit -> Fill with FG Color.

Image 11

Step 11:

Then go to Filters -> Noise -> HSV Noise and put Dulling as 1 and everything else to the right.

Image 12

Step 12:

Then go to Colors -> Saturation and put the Scale as 0. After that go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and put the size of X and Y around 6.

Image 13

Step 13:

Then go to Colors-> Levels and drag the input level near to the white peek.

Image 14

Step 14:

Then add a motion blur by clicking Filters -> Blur -> Linear Motion Blur and put the length as around 160.

Image 15

Step 15:

Then go to Colors -> Curves and take the bottom left node to a little bit right and take the top-right node to a little bit left.

Image 16

Step 16:

Then grab the Unified Transform Tool and click on the image. Then take the top node and click and drag down till it’s going to where the reflection is, and take the right node and bring that out and do the same as the left node. And also, you have to drag out the diamond shape node on the right and the left side and then press enter on the keyboard.

Image 17

Step 17:

Then go to Layer -> Layer to Image Size and click and drag the water layer beneath the other layers.

And after that take the top layer and click the Layer -> Layer to image size.

Then go to Filter -> Map -> Displace and click the Aux Input layer and click the water layer that we have created. Do the same thing into the Aux2 Input as well. And drag the Horizontal and vertical displacement to nearly 17 then click OK.

Image 18

Step 18:

And finally, turn off the visibility of the water layer.

Here we go.

This is the end of the tutorial. Hope you enjoy it.