There is NO post work in any of the images below!
All came straight out of Bryce.
Another trick is to mix a water material a little lighter than your main water on the back waves and the water spray on the front waves.
If you like that "spray as if the waves are crashing onto the shore, select a few of your back waves and double the size and apply the snow material. Make sure you click the arrow to raise the terrain out of the waves. If necessary, again depending on yor sky and lighting, adjust the transparency to work with your settings.
You can download the snow mat HERE.
One further tip, use all this in conjunction with Peter Sharpe's splash tut and add a couple rocks with the splash in the middle of the waves. You can find his tut's and the splash material at http://www.petersharpe.com .
I added a rock, a sphere with snow texture and one terrain done following Peter Sharpe's tut which I also have saved as a obp to the scene above. Again, I have done this very quickly just to give you an idea, but it will end up looking something like this...
More variations...
You can pick a couple of the waves and increase the height, go back into the terrain editor an hit the slope noise a few more times, erode a bit by dragging on the erode button, dampen, even ever so slightly drag on the mounds button to add a bit more bump for different looking waves. The examples shown above are more for the gentle waves that lap on the shore, but the possibilities are endless. The iceberg texture works good for waves also. If you are doing waves in the sea, try just a water texture or the Bryce seafoam texture on a larger terrain. You can also add a sphere on top of your waves to provide more mist, summer slab clouds works well! Just remember for every additional effect you add, you will increase your render time. All of these textures are intense and slow alone, combined you can get some great effects, but you will pay in render time :-) The Bryce waves in your Mountains objects work well also for distance waves... you'll want to smooth them out some.
Try adding some more waves to the water. Your grid will now look something like this. Once again, the red terrains are the waves...
In the image below, the two waves in the back are textured with a material I made out of a combination of water and clouds, to give a more misty water. You can download it HERE . This probably works best if you texture your ground with the Deep Sea mat found in the water materials which is the material I used on the water in this image and to make the mat.
A palm on the beach and you have a nice little beach scene. Of course the sky and horizon are all wrong, but it was best to use the default for the purpose of this tutorial so you can compare your results in the default also without having to worry about the sky :-)
Finally, a change in the sky and a few extras and it creates a totally different look!
Once you have made some good stuff and saved it as obp files you can use them over again without all the work involved in the first creation. Have fun!