How to Create an Awesome See-Through Water Horse in Photoshop

Step 12

Press Ctrl + C to copy the selection and Ctrl + V to paste it into our document. You can see that it looks yellow and a bit dark. We will correct this in the next step.

Step 13

Press Ctrl + Shift + U to desaturate the splash. This will get rid of the ugly yellow color. Still, the image look pretty gray. To increase the luminosity and contrast let’s use a Curves Adjustment. We won’t use adjustments layers for this because we will have a lot of water splashes and the multitude of clipped adjustments layer will clutter the document without offering a real advantage. I am all for non-destructive editing and I usually use adjustment layers as much as possible but sometimes a good old simple Curve will do just fine. So choose Image > Adjustments > Curves and drag the curve upwards to increase the lightness. Also drag the right slider a little towards the left to increase contrast. You can see that the splash it is already looking better.

Step 14

Now it’s time to position the water splash. Press Ctrl + T and rotate the splash to match the picture below and press Enter.

Step 15

If you will take a closer look at the splash you will notice some unwanted pixels from our Color Range selection. To get rid of them we will use a layer mask.

Step 16

Choose Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All to add a layer mask. I strongly advise you to assign a keyboard shortcut to this very useful command so you can have at you fingertips all the time. Choose a round black soft brush tool and paint in the layer mask the highlighted areas from above and any other unwanted residual pixels. Also if you have any straight lines try to paint over them so the image doesn’t look fake. Now the splash look nice and tidy.

Step 17

I will not repeat all the steps above for each water splash – this will take a lot of useless writing. Instead I will only show you the placement of each water splash. If you will follow the recipe from the above steps you should be fine. To recap:

• Use Color Range to select the water splash.
• Paste the water splash into our document.
• Desaturate and apply a Curves adjustment to lighten it up.
• Position the splash using Free Transform (Ctrl + T).
• Use a layer mask to get rid of unwanted pixels or obvious lines.

Step 18

Let’s make the back of the horse. Place “Water Splash 3” like shown below

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