Water FX

Mike Rankin

14

April showers bring May flowers, but can you make it rain inside InDesign? To simulate a clear substance like water, you need to make the fill of an object or text invisible, while still showing both the shadows and highlights of effects applied to that object (or text). Something like this.

A good trick for hiding the fill of an object is to use [Paper] and set it to the Multiply blending mode. This is cool, but it won’t work to simulate water. Since the Multiply mode always makes colors darker, all highlights will disappear. And water’s a pretty reflective substance, so wet FX rely mostly on getting good highlights. What we need is a blending mode that can make a blend color disappear AND preserve strong highlights and shadows. In fact, there is just such a blending mode: Hard Light.

Like its blending mode cousins, Soft Light and Overlay, Hard Light will make a blend color of gray (50% black) disappear. But Overlay and Soft Light will mix the highlights and shadows of the blend and base colors, making for a, well, softer lighting effect.

Not what we want for H2O.

So to make a watery effect, first set the document to use RGB Transparency Blend Space from the Edit menu.

Many of InDesign’s blending modes (including Hard Light) work much better when colors are blended in RGB. Note that this will convert all colors on spreads containing transparency to RGB. If you need to produce CMYK output, be sure to account for that in your export or print settings.

Next, fill text or an object with 50% black.

Then, to create shadows and highlights, apply an effect like Bevel and Emboss.

Finally, set the blending mode to Hard Light in the Effects panel.

The gray fill color disappears, but the highlights and shadows remain, giving you a nice watery effect.

When it comes to the exact settings used in the effect, your mileage will vary. Bevel and Emboss with a high Altitude setting works well.

A touch of Inner Shadow sometimes helps too. What looks best will depend on the background.

And speaking of the background, you may notice that if you apply a blending mode to an object with nothing behind it, nothing happens. This makes sense since there’s nothing for the blend color to blend with. It takes two to tango in the dance of transparency. So what if you want to simulate water on white? You need to do two things. First, give your object something to blend with. Put a frame filled with [Paper] behind it. Second, adjust the fill color of your watery object to something slightly darker than 50% black. Just enough to distinguish the shadows and highlights from the rest of the object.

Now, why am I thirsty all of a sudden?

[Editor’s Note: For more of Mike’s amazing InDesign FX, see his ebook here!]