How to Make a Water Reflection in Paint Shop Pro

Making your photos and images stand out by adding elements isn't hard to do yourself. Enhance your digital scrapbooking, web pages, MySpace comment tags, and more by learning a simple technique to add a reflecting pool of water without any additional plug-ins.

Open Paint Shop Pro, then open any image (that you own, have permission to use, or is in the public domain) that you would like to add a water reflection. Make a note of the width and height of the image.

Open a new image with a white or transparent background and 16 million colors. Make the width the same as your image and the height about double. If your final image is too long you can crop the unnecessary length at that point, but it's difficult to add length if you find the new image is too short.

Make sure your first picture is active and copy it by clicking on Edit and then Copy. Click on the new image to make it active and paste the copy by clicking on Edit and then Paste as new layer. Move the copied image to the top of the new image, ensuring there are no transparent or white edges showing except at the bottom.

Add a new layer to the image by clicking on Layers and then New Raster Layer. Leave the default settings and click OK. Change to the Airbrush Tool by clicking on the drop down arrow beside the Paintbrush icon and clicking on the Airbrush. Adjust the settings to round, size about 5 (you may change this depending on the size of your image), and opacity of 100. Set the foreground color to black. Draw a line across the bottom of the image. It doesn't have to be perfectly straight, but make sure it is on the image, not the background.

Apply a Gaussian Blur to the line by clicking on Adjust and going down to Blur, then clicking on Gaussian Blur. Adjust the radius to about 2-4 and click OK.

Paste the original image again as a new layer. Turn this layer upside down by clicking on Image and then Flip. Move the image so it is directly underneath the first one. It is all right if background is showing at the bottom, but not on the other sides.

Optional step - in your Layers Palette, move the mirror image under the main image.

With the mirror image active, click on Adjust, go down to Blur, and then click on Motion Blur. Change the Direction to 180, and set the Strength to about 10, then click OK. You can also try using a Radial Blur instead.

Once you are satisfied with the result, crop any unnecessary background and then merge all the layers by clicking on Layers, going down to Merge, and clicking on Merge All (Flatten). Save your image. These steps are adaptable in Paint Shop Pro versions 7 and up. Experiment with standard reflections, or try these steps for a unique blend of different images.