I only want to see the reflection, not the surface it’s reflecting on

[Simon Ubsdell]

Just make your floor black.

If you need to kill the alpha channel of the floor (so that the reflection sits on a different background), set its Blending to Preserve Opacity.

Here’s that in action:

https://tokyo-uk.com/Motion/ReflectionOnly.zip

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Gareth Randall]

Thanks for that, Simon. I should probably have mentioned, my background isn’t black – it’s a full-frame gradient. Invariably, reflections tutorials use solid colour backgrounds, usually black.

I’ve been able to get a reflection, albeit without the original colours, by using a black floor and setting its blend mode to Silhouette Luma. I’m assuming that if I wanted it in colour, I’d just have to duplicate and flip the text? The reflection can appear in colour dependent on the blend mode, but it doesn’t look quite right in any of them.

[Simon Ubsdell]

The trick there is to set the Blend Mode to Overlay and the Color of the floor to mid grey – which is not, as you might have thought 0.5/0.5/0.5 but rather 0.54/0.54/0.54.

https://tokyo-uk.com/Motion/ReflectionOnly.002.zip

That works – obviously you need to make sure that your Gradient BG layer is not casting reflections.

Overlay with grey is a very useful trick to know about for this kind of thing.

Hope that helps.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Gareth Randall]

Brilliant – thanks!

[Simon Ubsdell]

I hope that helped. Just to clarify what’s happening with the Overlay Blend Mode in this scenario.

Overlay uses a combination of the Screen on the lighter pixels, and Multiply on the darker pixels and applies each mode at half-strength, the result being that 50% gray values will be transparent.

The Motion reflection however disregards the Blend Mode of the layer and will still be visible – note that it has its own Blend Mode option.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com