Wave Tutorial

Some of these tutorial images are thumbnails. To view them larger, simply click on the image. I recommend right clicking to open the image in a new window instead of the current page.

While playing around in Adobe, I discovered a really neat wave effect. This is what I ended up with:

Now, this image was scaled down from an 800×600 image size. It’s a fun effect that you might find useful, like I did. It’s very simple to do. Just follow the tutorial, and you can have the same image, with either the same or different colors.

Open a new image. Choose the 2 colors you want on the color palette . The foreground and background colors will be used in the next step. The colors I used for this image were 1EAAFF (Baby Blue) and FFFFFF (White). (I colorized it to purple later.)

On The Menu Bar Select Filter > Render > Clouds. Now you should have a cloudy image that used the two colors you chose. This is a small thumbnail of what mine looked like [:

On The Menu Bar Select Filter > Distort > Pinch. Set it to 100% and click OK. You should notice the image pinching. Hit Ctrl+F twice.
On The Menu Bar Select Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates select ‘Rectangular to Polar’. Click OK. You should have something like this:

On The Menu Bar Select Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple. Set the Ripple size to 9 and the Ripple Magnitude to 9 as well. Click OK.
On The Menu Bar Select Filter > Distort > Wave. Set to these configurations:
Number of Generators: 10
Wavelength: Min=1 Max=5
Amplitude: Left Box=1 Right Box=57
Scale: Horizontal=91% Vertical=100%
Make sure ‘Wrap Around’ is checked.
Click OK.

Your image should be very close to the finished product.

To make it easier to colorize my image (make it any color without redoing all the steps) I boosted the contrast by 20. You can do that by going on the Menu Bar > Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast.
For my completed image, I didn’t colorize it, but you can if you’d like. Just go to the Menu Bar and select Image > Adjustments > Hue / Saturation (Ctrl+U). And change the Hue color to whatever you would like. I changed mine to purple and boosted the contrast by 40.

Done!

This tutorial copyright 2006 Insidious-Allure.Org. All Rights Reserved.