Creating Real Looking Soap Bubbles

Actually, you can find a lot of tutorials how to make soap bubbles, but in this Photoshop tutorial I would like to demonstrate you unique and effective technique of doing it. This tutorial can be done by novice also.

In the beginning I would like to find some picture where we will create our soap bubbles effect. I think this one will be good. Open up the picture and create a new layer above the canvas. Then create round selection with Elliptical Marquee Tool and fill it with white color.

After that use Select > Modify > Contract and contract selected area about 1 pixel, then press Delete button to clear selection.

Ok, then create a new one layer and apply Edit > Stroke with following presets:

Now you have something like this:

Remove selection with Ctrl+D and apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur using setting similar to these:

After that press Ctrl+T and reduce current layer size about 93% horizontal and vertical.

Ok, process the soap bubble creating. Create a new layer again. After that select the Brush Toll and a soft round brush about 125 pixels to add two blurred white spots on the bubble.

Now, using the Elliptical Marquee Tool create selection similar to the bubble size and fill it with grey (#969696) color.

After that apply Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone and set up following values.

Now we have something like picture what you can see below:

Apply Blur > Filter > Spherize:

See the difference now:

After that use one more Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set up the next parameters.

The result should be next:

Ok, now mess with the layer mode & opacity/fill. I tried Overlay with a fill of 20%. After that create a new layer and fill it with white to transparent gradient just a little bit!

Remove selection with Ctrl+D and merge all soap bubble layers in one. Then blur new layer just a little bit with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur:

Set up layer mode as Overlay again. Ok, now use Ctrl+T to reduce the bubble as much as you want.

Bring more different size copies to the canvas. It looks really nice as for me now.

I’m sorry, but we are done for now. Enjoy your own real looking nice soap bubbles!