OZAM EDITING STUDIO

Hello everyone! In this tutorial we will show you how to turn a circle into water drop using Photoshop’s various Layer Styles (inner-outer glow, shadows etc.).

Have a look at the four water drops:


Drop 1 and 2 are same, the only difference is drop 2 isn’t perfectly round like 1. Drope 4 is having slightly different settings from drop 1 (central part is filled with light color) while drop 3 is completely filled with light color and looking less like a water drop (but some other liquid?).
We included three styles only to show that you can achieve different feel in your water drop by doing a little variation in the Layer Style settings.
Let’s Start with water drop 1 and 2:
Create a new document in Photoshop with RGB color mode and resolution 300 px/inch. (We took the canvas size 600 x 600 px here and filled it with a linear gradient of colors: #57ad04 and #c9f401)
Step 1:
Create a new layer (Shift+Ctrl+N) and name it Drop1 (or anything). Now, select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and draw a circle (about 85 pixels wide) holding Shift key. Fill it with your foreground color (shortcut Alt+Backspace). And then press Ctrl+D to deselect it.
If you want to make your water drop like “Drop 2″, give it a random shape with Warp Tool. For that, press Ctrl+T, it will bring the transform tool, right-click on the transform box and select “warp”. Move the reference points and give it a random shape then press enter.

Step 2:
Go to Layers window and change the “Fill”  property of your Drop 1 layer from 100% to 0%.

Step 3:
Go to Layer >> Layer Style >> Drop Shadow. (Or you can also double-click on the thumbnail of “drop1″ layer in layers window, it will open the Layer Style window from where you can select Drop Shadow)
Select Blend Mode: Multiply, Opacity: 65%, uncheck “use global light” and change angle to 45, Distance: 8, Spread: 0, Size: 6. Leave rest of the things to default.

Step 4:
If you didn’t click on the Ok after making changes on settings you can click on “Inner Shadow” in the styles panel. And if you did, you can again go to Layer >> Layer Style >> and Inner Shadow this time.
Apply black inner shadow on Multiply mode with opacity set to 40% and angle about 28 degree (don’t use global light again). Set Distance: 1, Choke: 10 and Size: 7.

Step 5:
Now we will apply an outer glow of black color at multiply mode which will serve as very thin shadow around the drop. Click on Outer Glow and choose the settings as shown below:

Step 6:
We want the central part of our drop to be darker. For that we will apply an inner glow of black color on multiply mode. Click on Inner glow and adjust Opacity: 21, Source: center, choke: 7, Size: 57.

Step 7:
Another thing we need on our water drop is a thin glow on the bottom left corner and for that we will apply a gradient overly on it.
Click on Gradient overlay and then click on the default black and white gradient  to open the gradient editor.

In editor window click on the gradient stops and choose a light yellow color (color code #e3f928) for both color stops. Remember that the color we chose here is depending on our background. So, choose your gradient fill color according to your background. For example if your drop is on gray background, choose white.

Now, Since we only need the color on one corner of our drop, we will decrease the opacity of right color stop to zero to make it disappear. Click on its Opacity Stop and set the opacity to zero.

Also, drag this stop leftward to decrease the amount filled with yellow color.

Click “Ok” and make the following changes to Gradient properties:

Step 8 (optional):
If you want a rough surface below your water drop (because water drop creates a lens effect and makes the surface below it look sharper) apply a pattern overly of rough texture at overlay mode.
Here we have applied the “Blue Dust” pattern which is in default patterns of Photoshop CS4. Mode: Overlay and Opacity: 38.


That’s it for the Layer styles. Now all you need to do is create a new layer (Shift+Ctrl+N) and then take a hard round brush to paint some glow on the top right side of the water drop like shown below:


For water drop 3 and 4 we did following changes in the Layer Style settings:


Additionally, if you want to know how we applied the lens effect on our text:
Step 1:
Place your text layer below the water drops. Go to layer window, right-click on text layer and click on “Resterize Type”.

Step 2:
Press Ctrl and click on the thumbnail of the water drop layer below which you want to give the lens effect (to make selection of the size of water drop). Now press Ctrl+T to bring transform tool (make sure your text layer is selected). Right click under transform box and choose warp.

After Selecting Warp, go to Warp drop-down menu and select Fisheye effect. Fill the Bend value according to your drop (we let it stay on default 50%) and press enter.

Apply the same process for other drops as well and that’s it.