Waterdrops

finished project
  Download a preset.

You will need my Droplets Balls and Bubbles preset, unzip and extract it to your Presets directory.

  
  Open an image and prepare it for B&B.

Choose the image that you want to use, you can do this effect on any image however it will look more authentic on an image of a flat object. Here I've used a photo that I took of a tiled building. Layers ->New Raster Layer. Change the blend mode from Normal to Luminance. Hit OK.

 See a screen capture of this step.
Adding the drops Apply Balls and Bubbles.

Effects ->Artistic Effects ->Balls and Bubbles. Load the amc_droplets preset. If you don't like the placement of the drops, play around with the Seed field. If there are too many or too few drops, adjust the Coverage. If the drops are too large or too small, adjust the Average Size. If the variation in size of the drops is not satisfactory, adjust the Size Variation. When you're happy with the drops, hit OK.

 See a screen capture of this step.
organic drops Make the drops look more natural.

Water drops are almost never perfectly round in the way that the B&B filter produces. We will make the drops more organic with the Warp brush. Click on the warp brush toolWarp brush. We will use the default settings on this brush in push mode of warp brush Push mode. If your drops are very large or very small, you may want to adjust the Size setting for the brush in the tool ribbon. Use the brush near the edges of drops, rather than pushing from the center. You don't want to destroy the reflective effect that B&B produces, all you want to do is make the edges of the drops less regular.

 See a screen capture of this step.
background refracted Add realism to the drops.

When water drops form like this they tend to behave something like a magnifying lens. We'll add some refraction to the underlying image. Click on the magic wand toolMagic Wand tool. Click somewhere outside the drops. Selections ->Invert. Only the drops should now be selected. Selections ->Modify ->Contract by 2 pixels. Selections ->Modify ->Feather by 2 pixels. You may want to hide the selection marquee for this, Selections ->Hide Marquee. Go to the Layer Control Palette and make the bottom layer (your photo) the active layer by clicking on it. Effects ->Distortion Effects ->Punch. The Strength setting will depend upon the size of your drops and the specific nature of your photo. Here I've used a setting of 25.

  
finished image with drop shadow Add depth to the drops.

Layers-> New Raster Layer. This should put a fresh layer in between the two original layers and select it for you. Effects ->3D Effects ->Drop Shadow. Set both Offsets to 1, Opacity to 100, Blur to 5. To set the drop shadow color, mouse over the color swatch. Press and hold down the Control key to instantly switch to eyedropper mode. Mouse over the image and choose the predominant background color. In this image it is #D9130A. Click on the color swatch to bring up the Material dialog. Drag the lightness slider down until you have a very dark but not black color. In this image I used #520604. Hit OK.