I would consider this article somewhat beyond basic as it uses layers and masking in Photoshop. If you aren’t already using layers and masking in Photoshop, you should take some time and learn about them. Layers are where the real power of Photoshop lie, and they open up a world limited only by your imagination.
You’ve all seen the shots of fruit splashing into a liquid like milk or fizzy water. I had never tried it until just recently, but I’ll describe how I got my shots. First a word of caution; I didn’t use a laser beam trigger, so this technique is more miss than hit and you should expect to do 50 or more drop/splashes, just to get a few good splashes to work with. Also all that splashing is messy. I used a 3×4 foot sheet of corrugated plastic and soaked up excess liquid every few shots. This might be better shot in the garage or outdoors (but not in daylight) if you don’t have a good plan for dealing with the mess.
Shooting My setup was a 3×4 piece of white corrugated plastic on a high tabletop. My background and the only light was a 24x24in softbox with a speedlite. The camera has to be mounted on a tripod, and once you have the glass placed where you want it in the composition, set focus and DO NOT change the focus or move the glass as we’ll be compositing multiple shots in Photoshop. Allow plenty of room above the glass to allow room for the splashes. Since you’ll be in front of camera dropping the fruit you definitely need either a wired or wireless remote.
Set a low power on the speedlite for a shorter flash duration. In manual mode set your camera’s fasted synch speed (Usually around 1/200 sec), an aperture around f/4 or f/5.6. Fill the glass with your chosen liquid, place your fruit in the glass, and shoot a test shot with the highlight warning (blinkies) turned on in your review screen and shoot a test shot. You want most of the background to be blinking, but not the glass and fruit. If you need to, adjust your ISO until you get a mostly blown out background, but detail in the fruit and glass. Don’t increase the speedlite power past about 1/64 power to maintain a short flash duration.
When you have a good exposure, top off the liquid and shoot several shots with your fruit submerged and still. This will become your base image. Now for the real fun and mess. Remove the fruit, top off the liquid and drop the fruit into the glass from a height of 6 to 8 inches. Try to time pressing the release just as the fruit splashes into the water. You’ll improve with practice, but one good splash for every 10 drops would be a pretty good success rate. Top off the liquid between drops and use a towel or paper towels to clean up the spills.
Post Processing
Select the base image and several shots with a good splash. It doesn’t matter how the fruit looks in the splash shots, or even if it is fruit causing the splash. Here are the base image and splash shots that I used.
With the base and splash shots selected in Lightroom, right click on one of the images, select “edit in” and then choose “open as layers in Photoshop”.
Once the images are in Photoshop, move the base image to the bottom of the layers, then select all images, then edit/auto align layers.
Change the blend mode of the splash layers to “darken” and add a black mask to each layer. Turn off the “eyeball” of all layers and then turn it one for the first splash image. Make sure the mask is selected and use a brush to paint in white over just the splash. Repeat for all of the splash layers. Turn on all of the layers, flatten the layers and make any final adjustments. I used hue/saturation to make the lime a more vivid green.
Here is my final image. The splashes on the table top were added with a Photoshop water drops and splashes brush. You can download lots of specialty brushes for free. In this case just search for “free Photoshop brushes splash” on google.
For my second and third images I used a different glass, and an orange slice. I shot my base image, but the orange slice wouldn’t fit in the glass to drop. I was looking for something smaller, dense and waterproof to drop and found an old plastic frog for the drops. You can also see how my timing wasn’t always perfect. Again I used some splash brushes on the table top. I selected the base and five splashes for one image and the base and five different splashes for the other.
This was my very first attempt a couple of weeks ago. Not bad, but I didn’t like the glass.
