Lets face it - nothing can quite beat putting your feet into a nice cool stream on a hot summer's day and watching the clear water circulate around your feet.   As easy as this scene may be to imagine, however, the complexity of nature makes it very difficult to design the water in Photoshop.

This tutorial details a relatively simple starting point for a decent turbulent water effect in Photoshop.  The flexibility of the technique means that it can easily form the basis of more complicated creations, as well as be an excellent stock effect all by itself.

Step 1: Create a new document of a suitable size with a default white-filled background. Due to the random nature of the turbulent water, you may want to create a much bigger image than needed and then crop out an ideal section later. Set your foreground and background swatches to solid black and solid white (i.e. default colors), and select  Filter > Render > Clouds from the main menu.  Then mix it up a little with Filter > Render > Difference Clouds.  You should end up with something that resembles my image on the left.

Step 2: To turn the clouds into a turbulent effect, run Filter > Stylize > Glowing Edges with the following settings: Edge Width: 2 Edge Brightness:10 Smoothness: 5 Press OK to render the effect.  As mentioned before, the clouds filters have a random seed to them, so don't be worried if your image does not exactly resemble mine.

Step 3: These ripples are OK, but they lack proper coloring.  To correct this oversight, load up the hue/saturation dialog box via Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.  Ensure the 'colorize' checkbox is checked and enter a Hue of +202, with a Saturation of +63.  Leave all other settings unaltered, and press OK.

Step 4: Create a new transparent layer on top of your background layer and select two shades of blue in your foreground & background color swatches.  In my case, I used a background color of #18325C and a foreground color of #0E86DF.    Then, with your Gradient Tool selected and set to a linear progression, drag a line from one corner to the other to create a subtle gradient across your new layer.

Step 5: Now all you need to do is set the layer blending mode of the gradient layer to Linear Dodge and admire your results! You shouldn't finish here, of course!   The water can be improved immeasurably with bubbles, manually added water swirls, and even simple detritus like leaves... but I'll leave that up to you.   Have fun! :)

- Tutorial written by Jacky136

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