Once you have Ellipse tool selected choose a neutral grey colour from your colour palette, like 50% grey, and simply draw your droplet. You can make the shape of your drop more elliptical using the Direct Selection Tool and the Pen tool or just leave it round to keep things simple.

We need next to start applying some layer styles. For this we will change the blend mode to Overlay.

Bring up your Layers Styles dialogue box by double clicking on the blank area of your layer.

We will start from the top and add some layer styles:
1. Drop Shadow, set the opacity to 15% and the angle to 90 degrees and choose the second from top left contour option.
2. Inner Shadow, and again opacity 15% angle 90 degrees.
3. Inner Glow, blend mode multiply and colour to black the opacity to 20%.
4. Bevel and emboss, style inner bevel, depth 100%, angle 90 degrees and altitude to 70. The highlight mode normal with white colour increase the opacity to 100% and shadow mode to overlay with white colour and 90% and click OK.

The result of these adjustments should look like this:

The last thing we need to take care of is to distort the background image behind the droplet. To do this go select your background layer and hold down ctrl and then Filter->Distort->Ripple and adjust the settings to your liking and hit OK. Once you have your first water drop you can easily adjust the size and feel of your drops.

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But don’t be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we’ll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We’ll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we’ll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.

Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called “spot healing tool” to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Dont’ worry if you couldn’t remove all of them, we’ll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial. To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise -> Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough - making the skin look soft and graded, don’t care about the eyes.

Now we will do further removal by bluring the image. Use the Filter Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.

Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we’ll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter -> Add Noise, use the settings below:

Our skin is ready, now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you’re on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to ‘difference’ and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven’t.

Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here’s the results that you should see at this point:

The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter - like eyes and lips. Here’s the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:

Using this technique you can improve your pictures without spending on expensive make up products. It’s reasonably easy to implement and looks great! Hope you enjoyed it.

Here’s another airbrush technique.

Pop art is an art movement that became popular in the mid 1950s in the UK. It is an artists’ masterpiece usually created by isolating and manipulating specific parts of a picture. In the digital world, it is easier to show your art and create intriguing images using the digital tools available. You can give your photograph a comic-style look and also put a script on it. It really is a fun experience and a display of creativity.

Today we’ll learn how to create a type of pop art easily using Photoshop. We will work on a photograph and achieve results in this step-by-step tutorial.

First we will de-saturate the colors on the image as we would like to color it ourselves. You can do this by pressing a shortcut - Ctrl+Shift+U.

Now you need to remove the background by masking the selection and deleting the background. Do leave some edge around the face as we will need it ahead.

Make a duplicate of the layer as backup in case you get in a mess and want to redo (Press Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer). Now, we’ll make a black and white image using ‘Threshold’. Adjust it according to the contrast of your image to achieve a suitable result.

Now we’ll paint the skin of the face with colors. Create a new layer and use ‘multiply’ as blending mode. Choose a skin color and paint it. Let the eyes remain white.

Using the same technique, paint the eyeballs and hair with a different color.

Now, let’s color the lips. In our sketch we hardly have any outlines. So we will use the original image as a reference. Hide all layers except your original picture for guidance. When you’ve hidden all the layers, paint the lips on a new layer with reddish tint.

Draw a black border around the lips and give the layer a Brush Strokes > Spatter Filter to achieve a sketchy finish. You can now make the other layers visible again.

Let’s jazz up the background. We’ll give a round radial effect by using Filter > Sketch > Halftone pattern. Use ‘circle’ in pattern type and contrast colors for foreground and background. Here’s the result!

We can put some text and shapes to show a message. Draw white circles with black border and place a text inside. Here is our final pop-art.

There is much scope to play with when it comes to settings and tools in Photoshop. By using them you can achieve dramatic results real easy. You can impress your friends with your art by creating cool pop-art of their pictures!