Water and Rock Textures in Photoshop

Ocean Water Texture

This is a pretty cool way to quickly create a rather realistic water texture in Photoshop, useful when you need control over the color and mood of the water. This is a '2fer' tutorial since we'll be taking our finished water and turning it into a rock/ground cover texture. I guess you could call this our 'Surf N Turf.' (I could, but I won't and you can't make me..)

First, I'm assuming that you have the plugins from our Download Center 'PaternEditDo' and 'PaternEditUndo.' If you don't, then go get them now and install them, but hurry up 'cause we're all sitting here waiting for you. Actually, if you aren't familiar with creating seamless tiles, you should go through the Satin Fabric tutorial first or just ignore the references to making this seamless, for now.

Okay. Let's start.

Step 1

Create a new image of any size your heart desires. I'm doing a 256px by 256px. Square is good because it appeals to my sense of order and neatness (and my OCD) but you can use rectangular dimensions if you wish. (as long as you don't show it to me since I'll be forced to try to correct it).

The background should be white.

Step 2

Reset your color swatches. (Press 'D')

Go to Filters>Render>Clouds. Do this about 3 or 4 times until you get a nice balance of black and white.

I think it's advisable at this point to make the cloud pattern seamless. You're going to have to do it again, but doing it now leads to a better end result. So use PatternEditDo and your clone stamp to take out the seams now as naturally as possible.

One tip here is to set the clone stamp hardness to its lowest setting.

Step 3

Run PatternEditUndo to reset your image.

Go to Filters>Sketch>Bas Relief and set the Detail to 15 and the Smoothness to 1. Set the Light to come from the Bottom Left.

You should now have something like this.

Step 4

Call up Hue & Saturation (Ctrl-U) and check the Colorize box. Set the Hue to about 205, the Saturation to 55 and the Lightness to -20.

There's the water! Now all that's left is to make it seamless (again). So just repeat the process and you'll have an infinite ocean texture.

Save your finished water texture and then right click on the texture's title bar to choose 'Duplicate.' Make a copy of your water and put the original aside.

Let's Rock!

We're going to do a little alchemy here, turning our ocean into land - a useful thing to know if you're shipwrecked.

Step 1

Copy your duplicated image to the clipboard by pressing Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C.

Step 2

In the Layers Palette, click on the Channels tab and click the 'Create New Channel' button at the bottom to create a channel that should be named 'Alpha 1.'

With the new channel selected, press Ctrl-V to paste your image into this channel. You should now have a grayscale image in the Alpha channel.

Click on the channel labeled RGB.

Step 3

Now select Filters>Render>Lighting Effects. Set the controls to match the picture on the right. Take note of the way the lights are set up in the picture.

Once you have it all You may want to save this as a Preset before you continue - it could be very useful in the future. Press OK and Voila! Blue Rock!

Step 4

You may prefer a rock color that blends in more with the scenery. If so, press Ctrl-U again and set the Colorize box to On, Hue to 32, Saturation to 58, and Lightness to -28. You may wish to use your own numbers here. Go ahead and play. The work is all done.

I think you'll find that this is already seamless, but if not, you know what to do.

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