One of the hardest elements to replicate in PhotoShop, particularly when building from scratch, is water. This tutorial will show you how to create realistic-looking water droplets. With some tweaking, they can also be made to look like bubbles.

This tutorial is aimed toward Adobe PhotoShop CS3, but most PhotoShop versions will largely be the same with regard to this article.
The first thing we will do is load up PhotoShop CS3. You will see something like the following:

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To start off with, we will open up our image that we want to overlay with bubbles or water droplets in PhotoShop, and we will create a new layer to create the droplets on. We will select a small round brush (color black) and draw onto our layer the droplets we want. We can create round droplets or strokes of running droplets.

The image we start with will look like this:

Then we paint on our droplets in a new layer:

We can also give the droplets a less than perfect look by adding a slight Filter > Distort > Ripple. This is optional.
The next thing for us to do is to open up the layer styles of our droplets and add a Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow and Bevel and Emboss with the following settings:

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

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Click to enlarge.

These styles are not absolute - you may need to tweak the values to work for your chosen image. After these styles are added, it will look something like this:

Now all we need to do is reduce the Fill of the droplets layer to 0%, which will remove the black but keep the layer styles.

Once this is done, we should have something that looks like this:

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