Introducing miracle wrap

Adapted from "How to Cheat in Photoshop (Third Edition)" by Steve Caplin

The Plastic Wrap filter is one of the most useful special effects Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 has to offer. Use it to make anything glisten—from beads of sweat on a dancer’s forehead to visceral internal organs. Oh, and if you really want to, you can also use it to draw plastic wrapping.

In this tutorial, we’re going to use Plastic Wrap to create shiny, dripping paint on the can shown below, although exactly the same technique could be used to draw coffee, blood, or just about anything that dribbles.

Start with a basic image, such as this paint can.

1. The first step is to draw the drip. The best way of doing this is to use the Pen tool to draw an editable Bézier path: but if you’re uncomfortable with that tool, use the Brush tool instead—although it’s harder to create smooth curves with the Brush tool.

   Fill with a midtone gray (or paint with gray if you’re using the Brush tool). There’s no point worrying about color at this stage; all we need to do is to create a base that’s suitable for the Plastic Wrap filter.

   

   Draw the drip and fill it with a midtone gray.

2. Now comes the tricky part: preparing the artwork for the filter. The best way to begin is to shade the drips, using the Dodge and Burn tools, so that it looks vaguely three-dimensional. (Remember, if you hold down Alt [Windows] or Option [Mac OS] while using the Burn tool, it temporarily Dodges—a real time saver.)

   Next, create some random light and dark patches in the larger areas of the paint splash. There’s no exact science to this, since the Plastic Wrap filter works in mysterious and sometimes unfathomable ways; only experimentation will show you which techniques work and which don’t.

   

   Add shading to the drip using the Dodge and Burn tools.

3. Time for Plastic Wrapping. The settings don’t make an enormous amount of difference to the end result, but play around with them—you can see the changes instantly.

   Because the original shading can affect the filter’s result so dramatically you can’t expect to just draw, filter and have done with it. So try this: Do some shading, perform the filter, and see how it looks. Then undo, shade some more (or step back through the Histories to shade less) and apply the filter again. And again. This one can take some time to get right.

   

   Choose Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap to apply the Plastic Wrap filter, and then experiment with the settings.

   

   The shading you performed in step 2 affects the results of the Plastic Wrap filter.

4. Brightness and Contrast always help a filter like this—the more glistening and shiny, the better. The drips look OK, but that pool of paint at the bottom was a little unconvincing; to fix it, I drew an elliptical selection and added ripples using the ZigZag filter (which, for some reason, creates ripples, unlike the Ripple filter, which doesn’t).

   Because I used Lock Transparency to prevent the ZigZag filter from distorting the edges of my lovely curves, I needed to clone some of the original image back where the filter had filled bits with white. No problem—that’s what the History brush is there for.

   

   Choose Filter > Distort > ZigZag to add ripples using the ZigZag filter.

5. Finishing touches. The blue color was made with a solid blue layer, grouped with the drip and set to Hard Light, 70% opacity. This is a more effective method than simply using Hue and Saturation or even Curves to put the color in, since we want to add a solid wash rather than merely tinting the gray.

   Shadows were added both beneath the drips and around the edges to make it look more three-dimensional. Finally, I took the lid off the paint can so we could see some of the paint inside by creating a lid-shaped selection on a new layer, shading it, and then adding a drop of paint color.

   

   The final result, with the finishing touches applied.

   Hot tip: Performing a filter such as Plastic Wrap will change the look of the base layer completely. Always take a copy of the layer before applying the final filter effect to it, so you can revert and make changes if you need to later.

Adapted from "How to Cheat in Photoshop (Third Edition)" by Steve Caplin © 2005. Used with permission from Focal Press, a division of Elsevier. To buy this book, visit www.focalpress.com.

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