Scouting the internet’s different photoshop tutorials and reading people’s posts in different forums I found that there are very few tutorials showing you how to make realistic ice in photoshop and that many people find it very hard to do. I took this as a challenge and because I never had to make ice before and I thought I might give it a try just to see what I can come up with. After 2 hours of hard work, something showed up and I was satisfied with it, I liked the crystal sharp look of the ice I made in photoshop.Then I thought I could make a photoshop tutorial on how to make realistic ice in photoshop. Open a new document, mine is 640×480 pixels.

Make your background blue, I chose #2e517d for mine. Using the Custom Shape Tool, choose the shape named Fern, you can find it under the Nature shapes in the Custom Shape picker.Create a fern shape layer. All you have to do now is to double click the shape layer you just created in order to see the Layer Styles and to apply some styles to it.
Start with a Gradient Overlay at an angle of 111 degrees, with the scale set to 70% and opacity to 100%. The gradient must have the following colors: #c8dbea at 10%, #ffffff at 50% and #c8dbea at 90%. The effect should look similar to this:
Aplly a Stroke effect with the size of 1 px, Position set to Inside and Color set to #28a6ff.Aplly Color Overlay style, with the Opacity set to 75% and color set to #abc2e4.Apply a Bevel and Emboss style, leave all the settings default except your Gloss Contour which should change to Ring and your Shadow mode color which should be set to #3d5286.Add a Contour style and set your range to 100%, Contour to Cone and check Anti-aliased.Add Texture, with the Pattern set to Wood and Scale set to 63%.Apply a Satin style, but change your Blend Mode to Normal, Opacity to 100% and color to #a6d5f5.Add a Inner Glow, with the color changed to #2b81d9.Add a Outer Glow, with the color changed to #7dd9ff and the Opacity set to 15%.Add a Inner Shadow effect, with the color changed to #484a70.

Add a Drop Shadow style, with the color set to #1b2a6a, Opacity to 40%. Uncheck Use Global Light and set your Angle to -45 degrees, Distance to 65 px, Spread 5% and Size 100 px.Now you have an ice effect that can be easily modified and apllied to any other object you want.I always try to take my photoshop tutorials a little futher and see what else can I come up with if I am continuously improving an image. Here is what I come up with for this tutorial after adding a few other effects:

Open a new Photoshop document, mine is 480×480 pixels.
Using your Pen Tool create a shape like you see mine below.Now create a new layer, CTRL+click the shape layer you just created and then go to Edit > Stroke, set the width to 2 px and color to white and click OK.

Using a soft Round 65 pixels brush, delete the right part of this layer, until you obtain something like this:Now right click on the layer in the Layers Palette and apply a gradient to this layer from #ff3237 to #ff9b01:Duplicate this layer, on the new layer apply a Gaussian Blur filter with the radius set to about 4-7 px then duplicate this layer 2 times.Select the last three layers you created and merge them (you can go to the Layer menu and choose Merge Layers or CTRL+E).Duplicate this layer again and choose Edit > Free Transform and then right click and choose skew and skew it to right like you see in the picture below:Now press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+T and you should obtain something similar to this:Group the last 3 layers and then duplicate the group and go to Edit > Free Transform and choose Flip Horizontal. Arrange the 2 groups like you see below and you will obtain something that starts to look like a flower:Here you can see the 3 layers that a group contains:Make a selection aroud the flower:Create a new layer and fill it with a color;it doesn’t matter what color, mine is white. This layer should be arranged below all the layers.

1. We start by cutting out the object we want to work with so it has a white background in a layer beneath it.

2. Then make a copy of the object you are working on, and put it below the other on, and name it reflection, do this just by clicking on the layers text.

3. Now with the reflection layer selected hold down ctrl key while pressing T (this is shortcut for free transform). Use the upper middle dragable box to make the layer as a reflected image, by dragging it all the way down.tip: if you want it a bit more realistic holddown ctrl key while dragging the corners (not drag to much) to make the reflection a bit larger the closer it gets to you.

4. While still having the reflection layer selected go giv it a motion blur from the filters scrolldown, not to much, then giv it a ripple from the filters menu, at last put down the reflection layers opacity.

5. Now to the hard part (or just a bit more demanding). go to filters -> wave, well here are alot of parameters to play with, but try doing them like in the image below.

6. Thats it, just one more tip, I often see when I cut out objects from a background that the object is very cornered or pixelized, try using the filters -> diffuse glow. it gives some kind of depth of field.