Step 1 – Setting the Stage

Open up a new document in Photoshop, in this example I am using a 500pxx500px working area.

Create two new layers, first called water, next called ripple. Then select your Gradient tool or (G) and choose two nice shades of blue. Here I have used #00589d and #409ed3.

NOTE: The further apart your fade colours are, the more harsh your ripple will look.

Now we select the first layer, ‘water‘ and stretch a fade straight up from top to bottom. Darker at the bottom, lighter towards the top.

You then select your second layer ‘ripple’ and reverse the process, Dark at the top, light at the bottom.

See example image below.

Step 2 – The Ripple

In this stage we are going to create the ripple, and this can be done in one simple step in Photoshop.

Make sure you have the ‘ripple‘ layer selected, then go to Filter > Distort > Zig Zag

This will open the following box.

Make sure under ‘Style‘, Pond ripples are selected. You can then tweak the Amount and the Ridges to whatever suits your project, here I have set Amount to 80 and Ridges to 5. Now simply select OK.

This will give you a full screen ripple on your stage. Now we need to adjust the height of the layer to add perspective. Make sure you are still on the ‘ripple’ layer and select your move tool (V)

NOTE: Select ‘Show Transform Controls’ at the top of your tool bar.

Now we drag the layer vertically squashing it to around 30% of its original height. This can also be set in the top toolbar.

Step 3 – Cleaning up

Now we have our ripple and the correct angle to view on the stage we need to do some manual cleaning up. You can play around with layer effects here either by lightening or darkening the layer, I have chosen to keep it as is and perform a feathered elliptical marquee to crop off any excess layer fade. To do this select your marquee tool and make sure you have feather set, in my example it is set to 10px.

We now draw an ellipse around the area we want to crop. We then inverse the selection (Shift + Ctrl + I) and cut or mask the excess.

After your feathered mask or crop you may find you need to tidy the image up further depending on how much you cropped off, if so this can be done simple using a soft Eraser tool.

And there we have it, a very simple pond ripple. No it is not photographic! But it can be improved upon, or used in a multitude of areas. See below a couple of examples.

The Floating Box

The Bobbing Puffin

Heh, couldn’t resist!