How to Make a Bubble Bath in Photoshop

Start with a photo of an absolutely adorable child (or dog) in a tub with a rubber duckie in proximity.

 

To add bubbles to the photo, you first need to create a bubble brush in Photoshop. I did this by visiting Big Stock Photo and searching for “bubbles” to find a photo of some bubbles isolated on a white background. I found the perfect photo. If you want to use this one yourself, head on over to their website and grab it. The file number is listed on the photo below. When you purchase your photo, there will be no watermarks on the image.

 

Open the photo in Photoshop. Duplicate your background layer. Grab your magic wand brush with a tolerance of 3 and click on the white background on the top layer to select it. If you are using this photo, that one click should give you a pretty clean selection. Once you have all of the background selected and none of the bubbles, invert your selection by clicking Select/Inverse.

 

Now that you have just the bubbles selected, we are going to create a brush with them so we can paint them into out photo. Hit Edit/Define Brush Preset and a Brush Name box will appear. Name your brush whatever you want to.

 

Go back to your photo of the cute baby in the tub and create a new blank layer. Then double-click on the layer to rename it so you know that this is your bubbles layer.

 

Now select your brush tool and then open up your brushes pallate. Click on the Brush Tip Shape section and slide the spacing slider to right so that the bubbles start to, well… get spaced out. Then click on Shape Dynamics and increase size, angle and roundness jitter to around 25% each. Click on the Scatter secion and increase the Jitter to about 150%.

 

Make sure that you save this new brush as indicated below:

 

Now you are going to want to choose a color for your bubbles. I like to give mine a blue/purple tint to start with. Don’t get too hung up on which color you choose right now because we will be making some adjustments later. Double-click on your foreground color to bring up the color picker box. I have the “only web colors” box checked to simplify my selections. I first selected the brightest blue from the vvertical bar with the rainbow of colors. Then I selected the top-right color choice.

 

Now comes the fun part! With your brush at 100% opacity, start tapping and dragging your Wacom pen slightly upward in different areas to create bubbles floating around. Put some in front of the tub and have some floating out of the tub. Vary your brush size and stroke pressure with each stroke.  If you don’t like the way that the bubbles look after each stroke, just hit Control-Z to get rid of them. Dont go to crazy with them at this point. You are going to add a few more layers of bubbles yet. This is just your base layer with the most predominent bubbles. Here is how my first layer looks:

Create another new layer and rename it Bubbles 2. Click on your foreground color again and this time, pick the next lighter color over to the left.

 

Add just a few more bubbles on this layer. Then create another new layer, pick the next lighter color and add a few more bubbles. Repeat this until you have added a few bubbles at each of the colors on the top row of the color picker (except the pure white). You should now have 6 layers of bubbles and it should look something like below:

 

You can leave things just as they are now or if you want to jazz things up a bit and add a little life to the bubbles, you can select each layer individually and on each one, hit Image/Adjustments/Hue Saturation. Play with both the hue and saturation sliders until you get each layer as you like it. On the 1st bubble layer, I reduced the saturation quite a bit and I varied the hue on the rest of the layers. You can also lower the opacity of any of the layers if you feel that they are too strong.

Here’s how mine ended up in the end. Please feel free to share your bubble creations with me by sending them to susan@adogslifephoto.com. I would be happpy to add them to this post with a link to your website.

 

 Equipment used:

Adobe Photoshop CS4,  Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet