In this tutorial, I will show how I went from these sources:

And finished with this:

1. First thing is to find a good strawberry source, like this one:

Then I took one of the bubbles from the bubble source, resized it, and then placed it over the strawberry on another layer. I lowered the opacity a little bit so I can see through it better when liquifying it into the shape of the strawberry underneath. Make sure that the "show backdrop" box is checked before liquifying:

After liquifying the bubble, I ended up with this shape:

2. Then I destaurated the entire bubble so it was just black and white. Then we get this:

3. Then I duplicated this layer and set it to overlay. Then lowered the opacity down to 60%. But you can experiment with opacity percentages. Doing this gives the hilights a little more brightness:

4. After this I decided to select the seeds separately and place them on a new layer. It might not have been necessary but I did it anyway. I used the lasso tool to select them all, cut them, then placed them on their own layer. Setting it to overlay at 100% opacity:

5. Then I took this seed layer and duplicated it, then mirrored it so the seeds were a mirror image of the other seed layer. I then darkened this new layer a little bit and placed it basically in the same place as the other seeds, thus giving the impression that you can "See through" the bubble and see the seeds on the back side:

6. After this, I extracted the strawberry out of the base layer and placed it above all the other layers on it's own layer. After completely desaturating it, I set it to overlay at 100%:

7. Then I went back to the background layer and covered in the empty space left by the strawberry by cloning the background in. It was fairly simple since the background was a solid color with soft gradients from the shadow. I made sure to leave the leaves in since those were not going to be "bubblified":

8. Now the background strawberry is gone, I turned both of the bubble layers into layer masks. There's one bubble layer that's in normal mode and one layer that's in overlay mode. With both layers in layer mask modes, I used various soft brushes at different opacities on both layers to get the background to show through, then I ended up with this:

9. Now that the bubble is showing what's behind it, I need to show some leavesin the back now. So this is where the other strawberry source was used. I took a selection of the leaves:

Then I added that selection to a layer directly above the background but below everything else. After flipping the selection and erasing everything that wasn't needed, I lowered the opacity to 73% and ended up with this:

I basically did the same thing to fill in the other section in the back. Although I had to make this into a layer mask since part of leaves is behind the bubble while one section is showing on the outside. So I used a soft low-opacity brush to "erase" the areas of the leaves that were being seen through the bubble. Leaving the leaf that's showing through the side alone:

10. Now I needed to add the reflection of the leaves that are showing up on top. With the lasso tool I just selected a couple of the leaves and mirrored them. The reflection of the leaf that's basically in the center of the strawberry is on a layer set to overlay at 83%. The reflection of the leaf that's on the left side is set to normal since it's pretty bright on that side, setting it to overlay would end up not showing very much of the reflection. So it's set to 54%. These 2 layers are above all the other layers:

11. The bubble is basically done but now I wanted to add some sort of reflection. I found a really nice reflection source but it showed a house and a background:

Now since my image shows a strawberry on a table, having this type of reflection wouldn't make sense. So I decided to use it but keep the opacity down enough to where you can't really see what it is but you can still see colors and shapes to give it a nice reflection. I used the same method on this reflection bubble as I did on the original bubble to get the shape, then I set it to overlay at 65%, the layer was put above all the other layers:

12. With everything done now, I wanted to have the bubble berry "pop". So I used a brightness/contrast adjustment layer on top of everything. With the brightness set to -40%. Then I used a soft brush set to 100% to "erase" the strawberry area, leaving the strawberry light while everything else is darker:

That's it. Of course there's always some tweaking of individual layers and adjustments, especially from me. But it was all trial and error and you may feel the need to do the same. That's the beauty of it, there are many ways to go about it. Let me know if you have any questions. PermalinkNo replies