Blog Entry #2: Photoshop Bubble Tutorial

I used a tutorial that explained how to take a stock image of a straw berry and a stock image of a bubble and make the berry appear to be a bubble shown here. I used the cherry image shown below & to the left.  I also used the bubble image shown below & to the right.  The tutorial suggested that the fruit image's background be fairly simple.  This is because later in the tutorial you have to remove the fruit completely while retaining the shadows from the background.  I also chose a bubble with a simple background as it was easy to use the magic wand and quick selection tool to remove the bubble from it's background image.

The image to the right shows me lowering the transparency of the bubble and placing it over the cherry.  The lowered transparency helped me see how much I need to liquefy the bubble to completely match the cherry.  I have adjusted the size using scaling transformations as well so that less liquefying will be necessary in the next stage.

To the left shows an image of me in the process of liquefying the bubble around the cherry.  This process is almost completed but a few edges still need to be touched up so that the bubble fits the cherry exactly. The bubble gets desaturated to pure black & white after this as well as being duplicated a few times and getting its transparency adjusted.  The cherry is then extracted from the image & desaturated and set to overlay.


The image to the right shows the next step in the process.  The cherry must be removed from the background layer so that the we can see the background through the bubble cherry.  I used the clone stamp in order to clone the shadow of the cherry.  This was fairly difficult since the shadow is a gradient so I used a softer brush with a lower transparency.  I also used the dust & scratches filter in order to airbrush the shadow since I had imperfect stamping.

Since the cherry now shows the background behind it, it must also show the small bit of stem that is covered by the front surface of the cherry.  It must also show a reflection of the stem on top of the cherry.  I copied the lower part of the stem and placed it below the bottom of the stem slightly to show the small bit of stem that's covered.  Then I copied the entire stem and mirrored it 180.  I had to rotate it slightly more to get the right angle of the reflection.  I also lowered the transparency so that it would look reflective and not solid.

Next I added the reflection of a different bubble.  I had to remove this bubble from it's black background first but this was very easy to do by selecting the color range of black and then unselecting the parts inside the bubble.

The same process as before is used to mold this bubble onto the surface of the cherry.  This time though the bubble transparency must be lowered a lot since the reflection in the image comes from trees and a building.  These things aren't present in the background of our image, but this reflection will do just fine at a lowered transparency.

The final step is lightening the cherry with respect to the background.  This is accomplished by adding a brightness of -40 to the entire image.  Then you simply select the mask layer and erase parts that lay over the bubble & stem.  This makes the background just slightly less bright than the fruit in the image.

The final image is shown below.