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Posted on 17/09/21 1:24:22 PM
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 5474

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Re: How to float your boat
Aha! That Blend If is really neat!!

Something I don't use nearly enough.

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Posted on 17/09/21 2:24:37 PM
lwc
Hole in One
Posts: 3070

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Re: How to float your boat
Interesting, thanks Steve!

Posted on 17/09/21 3:16:41 PM
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner
Posts: 2976

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Re: How to float your boat
Blend if is something I rarely use. Must take a closer look. Well done Steve, and thanks for the tutorial.

Posted on 17/09/21 5:14:15 PM
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop
Posts: 5474

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Re: How to float your boat
Mariner wrote:
Blend if is something I rarely use. Must take a closer look. Well done Steve, and thanks for the tutorial.


It's very sophisticated in Affinity. Done with curves. I am pretty sure there is a tutorial on it by their very enthusiastic young tutor.

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Posted on 17/09/21 5:50:32 PM
Steve Caplin
Administrator
Posts: 6980

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Re: How to float your boat
Oops sorry deleted by accident

Last week's Friday Challenge involved placing a boat on water. There seemed to be some difficulty making the boat/water border, and I was asked to explain how it's done.

Its tricky, I'll be the first to admit. This solution isn't perfect, but it's reasonably convincing.

1. Put the boat on the water.



2. Mask the boat. It's important to follow the contours of the boat - for example, masking around the tiller rather than cutting straight across it. I masked this with a hard-edged brush, then used the Properties Panel to feather the mask: it's a much more controllable method than painting with a soft-edged brush in the first place.



3. Paint some water edge using a small brush.



4. Smudge the water edge. I used the Smudge tool to do this, to produce a soft result, then lowered the opacity of the edge so it wasn't too obtrusive.



5. Add some spray. I did this using a brush set to Dissolve mode, with a 10% Opacity to produce a fine array of dots.



6. Blur the spray. I used a 1.5 pixel Gaussian Blur here.



7. Smudge the spray. I used the Smudge tool again, to soften the spray even further.



8. Add some back spray. Same technique, adding a little more behind the boat.



9. Paint a shadow. It should be painted in blue, rather than black, or it will look too monochrome. Don't make it exactly boat shaped; it needs to follow the ripples of the water.



10. Make the wake. Boats push the water out of the way. I duplicated a section of the background, and used the Smudge tool at 100% Strength to make this water flow.



11. This is the part that really makes it work: double-click the Shadow layer, and look at the Blend If section. Drag the white Underlying Layer slider to the left so that the highlights in the water show through, then option/alt click to separate the triangle into two, so you can soften the effect slightly.



12. Here's the result: allowing the highlights in the water to override the shadow makes far more sense of the image.





Posted on 19/09/21 06:30:06 AM
tooquilos
Wizard of Oz
Posts: 2880

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Re: Re: How to float your boat
Thank you for the explanation Steve. I remember Maiden (Becky) told me about 'Blend if' option but I keep forgetting about it. It's a great feature.

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Posted on 04/10/21 07:49:45 AM
dwindt
Realism Realiser
Posts: 836

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Re: Re: How to float your boat
Very useful tutorial Steve. I've already put it to go use. Thank you.



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