When you take a picture of a building erected near some water body or the person standing near beach or pool, a mirror reflection of the building or person is shown in the water body. This adds another dimension to the beauty of the pictures being taken, especially when the water body has some waves in it. If you cannot find a water body near which you can stand to snap that amazing picture, then you can always add the mirror water reflection effect using GIMP, Photoshop, Reflection Generator or other tools.
1. Using Paint.net
- Open the picture in Paint.net.
- Select Image → Canvas Size and change the canvas height to 1.5 times the original height.
- Select the whole image, press Ctrl+C to copy the whole image. Select Edit → Paste into New Layer from the menubar to paste it into a new layer.
- Select Layers → Flip Vertical to flip the new layer. Select Layers → Layer Properties and change Mode to Multiply.
- Drag the new layer down to position it exactly under the original image making it look like a reflection.
- Select Effects → Blurs → Motion Blur and then add motion blur effect with 180 degrees rotation and distance of 4.
- The resulting picture would look something like this. Of course, you can play around with various effects and color settings to improve the lake reflection effect.
2. Using Reflection Generator
We covered this little utility in a previous post – adding lake reflection effect using reflection generator. This tool does not require any picture editing knowledge. You can just open the image in the tool and it will instantly add a reflection to the image. Even though it is very limited in terms of features and options, using it is very easy and it can export the result in the GIF animation format.
Other graphics editor applications like GIMP and Photoshop can also be used using very similar steps as described for the Paint.net. Some of the photo editor suites might also come with lake reflection plugins to make everything easy for you.