How to Merge a Baby And a Water Images Using Photoshop

The first thing that almost all of us try to do when starting to learn Photoshop is merging photos. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it seems, it is not as simple as copying and pasting layers because every picture has its own brightness, contrast, ...etc which are too hard to match when trying to merge photos. While it is almost impossible to make it look 100% real, we will see how we could merge a baby and a water photos so that it looks like the baby is in the water and happily swimming!

First and maybe the most important thing to do is to choose the suitable images to merge. Keep in mind that those two images should have almost the same brightness and contrast for the merging to be successful. For me, the water image is at the sunset time so I have chosen a dark baby's picture.
Open the two images that you have chosen in Photoshop, in this tutorial I am using Photoshop CS2 but using any other version will be fine.
For the baby's picture, select the baby only or whatever person you want to merge using the Lasso Tool (L) then click Select > Modify > Smooth, enter a 2 pixels value and press Ok.
Press Ctrl+C to copy the person you've just selected then click the water picture and press Ctrl+V to paste it.
Press Ctrl+J to duplicate the Background layer and rename it to Water also, rename the baby's layer to Baby.
In my case, the Baby layer is too big, if that's the case with you too then click the Baby layer, click Edit > Transform > Scale and scale it down to a reasonable size, make sure you resize the layer from the corner and keep pressing the Shift key while scaling in order to keep the ratio of both the width and the height.
Click the Magic Wand Tool (W), hide the Water layer by clicking the eye icon on the left, select the Baby layer, click on any empty area and click Select > Inverse (Shift+Ctrl+I) to select the baby only.
Make the Water layer visible again then click Create new fill or adjustment layer located at the bottom of the Layers window and choose Brightness/Contrast.
Play with the sliders for some time until you feel that the two images are in harmony then right click the new generated layer and click Merge Down.
You can also click the Smudge Tool (R) and play with it at the places where the baby touches the water for more realistic look.
Now we want to make the baby's reflection on the water so select the Baby layer then press (Ctrl+J) to duplicate it and rename the new layer to Reflection then click Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical.
Move the Reflection layer down until it is only touching the Baby layer and click Add vector mask located at the bottom of the Layers window.
Press (D), select the Gradient Tool (G) by pressing and holding the Paint Bucket Tool for some time, press the Shift key on your keyboard and draw a line from the top of the Reflection layer to the place where you want the reflection to end.
Set the Opacity of the Reflection layer to about 50%.
To give the reflection more realistic look, click the Layer thumbnail, click Filter > Blur > Motion Blur, choose 16 pixels for distance, choose an angle that matches the water stream and press Ok.

Here is the water reflection merge:

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How to Merge a Baby And a Water Images Using Photoshop

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