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Hey, heres a quick way to make Soap bubbles that look like they're coming to the surface.
1. New document, does not matter what size
2. New Layer.
3. Pick a radial gradient, does not matter which color, but there has to be 2 bands at the right that differ in brightness and transparent everywhere else(including the ends).
4. Put random gradients all over your canvas, good to have a variety of sizes. These are the bubbles.
5. Then emboss the gradients. Crank up the height up to its full amount and then use your own discretion for the Amount(I used about 92). This step may be repeated for effect.
6. Once youre done, go through the channels to see which one looks the best. Then extract the channel by turning it to a grayscale with the best channel selected. Then switch back to RGB.
7. Stick a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer on top of it and colorize it to whatever blue looks nice to you.
8. Oh yeah one more thing: sharpen the result with a high radius(i used 10.9) and a low amount(i used 59%), or whatever looks good to you.
That's all.
here is the result :
welcome tranquil222 ... I tried your technique and had a prob (probably my interpretation of your instructions ) ... so ... I have posted a pic below .. I chose the green channel and went greyscale (flattened image when window came up) went back to rgb but it didn't look good when I went into hue and saturation (btw you need to add 'tick colorise box') ... my first guess is that I have missed something (in the channells I wasn't sure what you mean by 'use the best one' ... I tried the blue - it was darker -- the red and green looked the same - tried them all ) my second guess is I'm not setting the gradient up properly, so have included it in the pic ... hope you can help ... thanks
Heres the gradient i chose:
basically they just need to be thinner, not be the same color and not have a stripe in the middle. what i meant by the best one is the one that looks most like bubbles. hope that helps. [righton]
Quick Bubbles 
) ... so ... I have posted a pic below .. I chose the green channel and went greyscale (flattened image when window came up) went back to rgb but it didn't look good when I went into hue and saturation (btw you need to add 'tick colorise box') ... my first guess is that I have missed something (in the channells I wasn't sure what you mean by 'use the best one' ... I tried the blue - it was darker -- the red and green looked the same - tried them all 
Linear Mode
