Creating (water) drops with GIMP.

Creating realistic water drops is something we all want to do to give our work a little more shine. I picked a rather dull picture of some apples to try this on so I could try to give them some life.
So here is a revised tutorial on how to do this.

#1
Open GIMP, drag and drop the photo you want to apply water
drops to. Go to File ­> Layers and click the "New Layer" button (first button, left bottom corner). On the new layer window, type a name for the new layer (e.g. Water Drop Layer) and click OK.
Now that the new layer is created, you can add your drops to the image.



In my case, I wanted more than one drop so after you make your first shape with your tool, hold down on your shift key while making more drops, make as many as you like but remember to hold the shift key before each one or you will have to start over.

#2
Select the eliptical tool and draw a small ellipse somewhere on your photo where you want the drop to be.
Click your gradient tool, , and drag straight down through the drops with your gradient set FG to BG with your colors set to black and white (default).
With your drops still selected, to go Modes and change to Overlay.



#3 Now we will create some nice shadows for the drops by going to Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow.
In the Drop Shadow window set the Offset X and Offset Y to 3, with the opacity set to 70 percent.
Repeat the Drop Shadow with Offset Y and Offset X to 3 but change the opacity to 30 percent.




3a. Now that you have the two layers of Drop Shadow completed, grab the move tool and drag the #1 shadow down and a little to the right just a bit. Then click the #2 shadow layer and drag it the same way.
(To do this, click your apples window with your move tool selected, and use your keyboard arrows to move it down a couple of clicks then your right arrow a couple more.

Okay, once you have your shadows in position, add another transparent layer to the stack and call it sparkles.
Take your small fuzzy brush and set your foreground color to white and make a small white dot in the upper left corner of each drop.


Now we are done. Please post back in this thread if you have any questions.

Molly; It's fantastic! Wow! I love it. I'll practise with your tut, Thank you very much.

Nice, but you're supposed to run the gradient on each drop so they have some highlight and shadow.

David, I have been trying that and every time I go to each drop, the gradientt does all them the same. Is there a way I can do them individually without them turning all black?
The only way I could tell so far is do every drop one at a time and I don't want to do that.

Here's what I came up with.

I made one water droplet using this tutorial, copied it, then use the clipboard brush of the droplet to paint more of them all around my apple.
Nice tut Molly.

That is really nice Wallace, I didn't think of copying to clipboard hit my head against the wall.
Thanks for doing my tute.

You're welcome.
It would've taken me much longer to make each drop. So I thought it would be faster to do it this way.
I was going to make an animated brush, but decided against that.
Maybe I should make one anyway, what do you think?
I can use your tut to make the droplets for the animated brush.

Wallace, you make as many brushes as your lil-ole-heart desires. I know you will make good use of them with your talent.

Molly this is my trial. Wallace you are a master making realistic drops. Thanks for so much help.

That is really a nice one Issabella, I could take a bite out of it right now.

Thanks to Molly.
BTW.. I'll have that animated droplet brush posted soon...

You have to do each drop separately.

This tutorial gave me an idea to cheat.
I found an image of droplets on a red apple.
Selected a drop I liked then color-to-alpha and chose pure red to convert it to alpha (since it's a red apple).

Then I used this as a brush like Wallace mentioned.
then after i was done creating drops on a separate layer, i drop shadow the whole layer.


and here's another try (with displacing the background using the shadow as displacement map, then duplicated the drops layer to make the drops a little brighter).


here's the droplet that i used.

trandoductin: that's a very well working technique, nice outcome. i never seem to get good results when i work from full colour images though, i always have to desaturate them first and colour-to-alpha away the mid grey tones - any good advice on how to get the red tones from the full colour picture with a good result?