Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Seamless Water Texture

Start by opening Photoshop and creating a new image. For this example, I chose the dimensions of 400x400 pixels. Hit D to set your colors to default: black as foreground and white as background. Go to Filter>Render>Clouds to make what will be the base of the water texture.

Now go to Filter>Blur>Radial Blur and use these settings - Amount: 38, Blur Method: Spin, Quality: Good (unless you don't mind waiting a little bit (I didn't), in that case choose Best). Then go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur with a radius of 2 because we want this to be blurry to the max.

Go to Filter>Sketch>Bas Relief and choose the settings - Detail: 13, Smoothness 10. Next go to Filter>Sketch>Chrome and select the following options - Detail: 5, Smoothness 2.

Ok, time to try to color in this masterpiece of wetness. There are an infinite number of ways you could go about doing this, so I'll just show you the general method I followed. Duplicate the layer by going to the Layers palette and dragging the layer with the water texture onto . Click on the eyeball to the left of the new layer you just made to hide it. Select the original (lower) layer and go to Image>Adjust>Channel Mixer. You may want to make it a different color, but to copy the blue I used make these changes - in the Red Output Channel move the blue to the left; in the Green Output Channel move the green slightly to the right; in the Blue Output Channel move the blue to the right. Next click on the at the top of the layers palette and choose New Adjustment Layer. Then choose Hue/Saturation as the type. Play around with the Hue and the Saturation bars until the blue color looks the way you like it. After that, click the upper layer in the Layers palette. In the left drop-down box change Normal to Color Dodge and lower the Opacity real low to about 5-10%. (This layer brightens the lightest areas of the image and makes them glow a little). As a final touch you may want to adjust the Hue/Saturation layer again (just double click it) or try adjusting the Curves of the lowest layer (click it and hit Ctrl/M) (Cmd+M).

Well, now you have a pretty decent-looking water texture. You would be done if this was merely a water texture tutorial, but this is a seamless water texture tutorial. First make sure you save your file. Then flatten your layers by going Layer>Flatten Image. Next go Filter>Other>Offset. Fill in the coordinates - Horizontal: 200, Vertical: 200. After that, go Filter>Distort>Twirl select 120° as the angle. Now you may be done here if you like the way it looks, but I had a poor turn out on this example - the four sections were still clearly visible. So to correct this simply add one more filter. Go Filter>Distort>ZigZag and choose - Amount: 10, Ridges: 5, Pond Ripples. That should do the trick, and you will end up with a perfectly seamless water texture. Just for fun, you may want to see your image in seamless-tiling glory. Hit Ctrl/A to select all, then go to Edit>Define Pattern. Create a new image (about 800x800 pixels), click the paint bucket, set Contents to Pattern in the Options palette, and click in your blank image. You can click the image to the left to see my example looks. Refreshing, eh?!

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