Technical Slop

Intro: Theory I

Lot's of good and possibly head exploding stuff ahead. Thinking cap on? Good. What's about to follow is my version of making reflections with just PhotoShop. You know, reflection maps.

So, what is a reflection map? Well, when you look at something shiny, you will see reflections of the surrounding environment. We'll be faking this with PhotoShop, so the photo or environment that you wrap to an object is the reflection map. (R-Map...?)

The way I see it, the whole process is broken down into 3 major steps:

1. The photograph to be wrapped or distorted. Doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph - could very well be a few well placed doodles. But a photograph is the usual route.
2. The distortion applied to the photograph to wrap it to an object. Be using Displace for this. Surprised? The vast majority of the pages to follow are about building the D-Map to displace the photograph.
3. Finishing touches. Ugh! I hate talking about finishing touches, but they are, for the most part, necessary. Basically adding shading and other things. Making it beautiful or something.

In my experience, you don't have to be that great at all three of those major steps. Usually nailing one and being mediocre with the other two is enough to get you by. That is, excellence in one of those steps will usually hide the ugliness of the other two. Not always the case, though - just in my experience.

Here, let's do some photograph scouting.

I grabbed 4 different photos and gave them each some Spherize to check it's potential. Spherize is quick-n-dirty, but can be a very good indication of how well a photo will work as a reflection map (R-Map...?).

In the upper-right, we have a night time picture with the moon visible. Man, that's beautiful. Very solid photo to work with. Not exactly happy with the other 3, but they might suffice with better distortion than Spherize and some solid finishing touches. Maybe...

Just to test my idea of being strong in one but weaker in the other two steps, I took the lower-left and added some finishing touches. Just some Invert and some shading set to various blending modes.

Whatcha think?

Personally, I'm kind of out on this one. While I am mostly happy with the finishing touches, the distortion could definitely be stronger. With better distortion, I think it just might be serviceable.

That was fun. Pretty basic, but fun. Bah! Who am I kidding? That was almost boring. Let's move on to some really good stuff. How about building a D-Map in an irregular shape instead of this boring Spherize crap? Sounds good to me.

Follow me, and we'll see how deep the rabbit's hole goes. (Sorry, couldn't resist that.)