Shiny Glass Ball Tutorial
- Load the color gradient layer's selection, and contract by 2 pixels. Hit shift + ctrl + i to invert the selection.
- Then shift + ctrl + alt + click on the color gradient layer in the layers palette again to select a 2 pixel wide sliver selection.
- Create a new layer called "outside reflections".
- Hit ctrl + h to hide your selection (marching ants).
- With white as your foreground, grab the Paintbrush Tool (B), and use a soft 45 pixel radius brush. Then add three subtle reflections to the outside of your ball in the areas shown:
- Deselect your hidden selection, and you are now done adding layers to the highlights layer set. So, you can click the little arrow to close it up if you want.
- Add a new layer called "ball stroke" and place it directly below the color gradient layer in layers palette.
- Load the color gradient layer's selection, and apply a 1 pixel, black stroke outside (Edit -> Stroke).
- Lower the stroke layer's opacity to 70% .
- Deselect, and click on color gradient in the layers palette to make it your current working layer.
- Now, go to Image -> Adjust -> Hue Saturation (ctrl + u) and make sure to check the "colorize" box.
- Adjust the sliders to get a nice color that you like the look of. I chose a deep red and thought it turned out well. But, please experiment with it.
Your ball should be looking pretty close to the screen shot below.
- Add a new layer directly below the ball stroke layer and name it "ball inset".
- Load the color gradient's selection, and expand (Select -> Modify -> Expand) by 3 pixels.
- Apply a dark to lighter gray gradient in the direction shown (I hid all the other layers on top of this one, just to show you what it should look like underneath):
- Deselect this selection.
- Bring up the guides we created earlier by going to View -> Show -> Guides.
- Create a new layer called "drop shadow", and place it right above the overall, white background layer.
- With the Elliptical Marquee Tool, place your cursor near the intersection point of the guides (make sure Snap to -> Guides is checked in the view menu), hold down alt + shift, and make a circle that is 210x210.
- Fill the selection with black, and keep it selected.
- You can now hide your guides.
- Create a new layer and call it "top left light".
- With a white to black and Radial Gradient create a gradient that looks like this (once again I hid the top layers to show you the full effect):
- Create another layer (keep your selection active) and call it "right light".
- Make another radial gradient that looks similar to this:
- Keep the selection active, lower this layer's opacity to 80% and change the mode from normal to Lighten.
The result should look like this:
- Create a new layer called "outside stroke", and you should have the 210x210 circle selection still active so give it a black 1 pixel stroke on the outside. Lower the opacity to 60%.
- Deselect, and make the drop shadow layer your current working layer.
- Gaussian blur this by 4, and move it down by 1 pixel and over by 1 and drop the opacity to 50%.
The last little part is the rivets and inset lines.
- Create a new layer above "right light" and name it "insets".
- Show your guides again, and draw a horizontal, solid line with the Line Tool (U). Make sure anti-alias is unchecked for the line tool.
- Zoom in to 200%, and draw a black horizontal line as indicated below (hold down shift to keep it perfectly horizontal):
- Hide your guides and change the layer mode to Overlay.
- Duplicate this layer by dragging it down to the new layer icon (it's right next to the trash icon) in the layers palette.
- Hit the "/" key on your keyboard to lock the layer, and fill it with white (if white is your foreground, hit alt + backspace, and if white is your background, hit ctrl + backspace).
- Drop this layer's opacity to 60% and keep its layer mode as Overlay.
- With the Move Tool as your current tool, hit the down arrow on your keyboard once to move it down 1 pixel.
- Make the duplicated white line layer (it should be called "insets copy") your current working layer, and press ctrl + e. This just merges it with the one directly below it.
- Duplicate this layer again, and while holding shift, drag it straight across and place it on the opposite side of the metallic outside ring, and you should have this:
Hit ctrl + e again to merge the right inset line onto the left inset line layer.
- Now, to create the rivets, zoom in 600%, and grab the Pencil Tool (B).
- Create a new layer called "rivets".
- Draw a 2x2 white square and drop its opacity to 50%.
- Create a new layer (don't worry about naming), and with the same 1 pixel pencil brush, draw a black line around the bottom and right sides of the white square.
- Drop this opacity to 20%, and hit ctrl + e to merge the black line with the white square. You should have something similar to this:
- Duplicate the layer, and move it down a few pixels to where its equally distant from the inset line as the top rivet above it. So if the bottom of the top rivet is 2 pixels away from the inset line, then the bottom rivet should also be 2 pixels vertically away from the inset line .
- Merge the two rivets into one layer, and duplicate. Hold shift and drag it straight across and put it in the middle of the metallic ring so it matches the position on the left hand side.
- Hit ctrl + e to merge the rivets onto one layer .
You are now done with the Shiny Glass Ball Tutorial! Zoom out and view your creation! It looks pretty shiny, huh?
I have added my logo to it, but please feel free to add your own logo or typography in there. This ball/ring combo looks excellent at smaller sizes to, so play around with that and use it as buttons for your site!
Thanks for completing the tutorial, and please go to the forums to give feedback and show off your creation! See you there. Also, please take a look at the other tutorials.
Sincerely,
