: How can I simulate a reflective table surface in a photograph of an object? I'm trying to give a photograph I took a nice reflection on Photoshop. I've done this with previous pictures by

@Cooney243

Your updated attempt is very close. Maybe my standards are getting low but, I think this will be convincing enough with a couple of minor adjustments.


Mask out the portions of the reflected object that overlap. In the front, you wouldn't see the base through the sculpture's foot and on the side you wouldn't see the sculpture through the base.
In the reflection, the sculpture figures seem to be bending toward the viewer. Don't stretch them out. In fact, you would probably be just fine fading the reflection out right around their arms.


Now the trick is doing this consistently across a range of images!

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@Barnes313

You won't be able to make a believable reflection of this image because of the perspective (having only the image as source).

But maybe you don't really have to make a full reflection. Perhaps you can get away with a hint of reflection to create an illusion of such.

For example. Just for demonstration, here I copied the base of the foot and morphed the bronze foot to make it somewhat fit position-wise (actually, the feet shouldn't be there at all, but I would have to do all over again to remove it so I'll leave it in for this). I then made a gradient mask over the copy and put it behind the original (I didn't do the side as this is just for demonstration, as the rough edges):



For critical situations where you don't have access to the object, you could model a rough replica in 3D and mirror that in correct perspective, then blur the resulting "reflection" to hide imperfections - of course, this will require modelling and rendering knowledge.

And there is the old painting techniques that can be used to draw colors below it in a rough manner to replicate water reflections.

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@Holmes874

I can't tell you how to fix it, because I don't think you can, but here's some info that might lead to a solution:



The left is an attempt at reflecting 2-point perspective. The challenge is that the reflected object has to adhere to the same perspective points as the regular object. So after flipping, you'll have to manually adjust each 'half' of the reflection. Shearing might be one way to do this (or distort). It won't be perfect, but might get you mostly there.

Your bigger problem, though, is that given the angle you took the photo, you're actually using 3 point perspective. So, you need to do the same adjustments (matching perspectives) but you also have to then somehow hide surfaces you wouldn't normally see in the reflection. For instance, if you are looking at the top surface of an element (in this case the pedestal), you wouldn't see that surface in the reflection.

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