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Painting the Web
book

Painting the Web

by Shelley Powers
May 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
656 pages
17h 41m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 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

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596515096Supplemental ContentErrata Page