Painting the Web

Reflecting on Reflection, and Shadowing Revisited

Reflections are a simple graphic technique with major visual impact, which explains their popularity. They also use a couple of editor functionalities I haven't covered yet in this book: the use of layer masking and transformations.

Reflections fall into two types. The first reflection type is used with simple objects, and really is nothing more than a sophisticated shadow technique. We'll look at a couple of variations of this type of "reflection."

Tip

To emphasize shadow more than reflection, add a Gaussian Blur to the reflected text in the first couple of examples, and change the color to a neutral gray.

A true reflection, though, is more of a mirrored look, and it works best when we're using an object that either has a three-dimensional shape or, at a minimum, has detail that's reflected so that we know we're dealing with a reflection and not a "shadowy" effect.

There's no real "right" or "wrong" way to create a reflection: it's more dependent on the effect you're trying to create and your satisfaction with the finished product. You might even want to try a variety of techniques when applying a reflection, just to see what works best.

Reflection As Mirror Image

The simplest reflection is one where you create a duplicate of what you're reflecting, flip it vertically, and then adjust the layer's opacity to 50% or less.

In this example, I'm going to create a reflection of text on a blue/aqua background using Photoshop (see Figure 5-22