How To: Create clouds over a sea in Photoshop

Pixel Perfect is the "perfect" show to help you with your Photoshop skills. Be amazed and learn as master digital artist Bert Monroy takes a stylus and a digital pad and treats it as Monet and Picasso do with oil and canvas. Learn the tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. In this episode, Ben shows you how to create cloud over a sea in Photoshop.

This week, Bert creates majestic clouds over a beautiful awe-inspiring sea - all with Photoshop.

Bert creates clouds over a sea from scratch! First, in order to create the sea, Bert picks a blue color and uses fiber filters (adjusting the strength and variance) and the gaussian blur filter to make the color realistic. Bert then distorts the blue sea (edit>transform>rotate and edit>transform>distort) to create waves that are bigger in the front and smaller in the back. In a new layer, Bert picks a deeper blue color, adds a liner gradient and places the layer in multiply mode in order to give the sea a real-life color. To color the sky, Bert pics a light blue color and adds a gradient in a new layer. To create the clouds, Bert creates a unique brush with the brush engine (adjusting shape dynamics - size and angle jitter - and turning off pen pressure). To create the rays of the sun, Bert makes white chunks/loose shapes using a hard edge brush and gives it the light effect by using the Radical Blur filter (with zoom function).

To add light reflection on the water, Bert uses a big brush and draws a white streak in a new layer over the sea. Bert then clips the layer with the sea, puts the layer in screen mode, and adjusts the underlying layer with the Blend if layer style.

Search Pixel Perfect on WonderHowTo for more Photoshop episodes from this Revision3 show.