This next tutorial is an appitizer for what is next to come………

Hi Everyone,

I’m serving up another Photo-shop trick for you. On the menu today we have a slick, modern-looking glass orb which has become a staple ingredient in the on-line interfaces we see today. It’s important to realize that make a sphere, as simple as it seems requires quite a bit of work. This tutorial is fairly basic, although there are others that get into exact shadowing and depth and angular precision. But, for photo-shop users a a basic to intermediate, this method should work just fine.

Step 1
We will start with a transparent layer. 
Draw a circle using the circular marquee tool by holding the Alt/Option and Shift. This creates a perfect circle, which is drawn from the center out.

Step 2

To fill this circle, we will create a Circular Gradient, going from dark to light blue. Use the settings here, then drag from the middle of the circle out.

Step #3
Create a new layer and change the gradient setting to Linear Gradient, and double click inside the gradient slider. We will have to create a gradient that starts at solid white and gradually fades away, this is called a Foreground to Transparent gradient. Drag the gradient tool from the top to the bottom, with the top white.

Step #4

Now Deslect this layer and press command-T (Mac), or control T (windows) to activate the Free Transform command. This makes it possible to manipulate the contents of this layer. Grab the bottom of the dotted square line and drag it about half way up, brin iin the sides a little bit until your image looks similar to mine. The idea is that we want to be able to see just a tiny bit of darker blue all around the white circle.

Step 5

Add a gassian blur to the white cirle and turn the opacity down a tiny bit. As you can see it really has takek shape, we could stop here, but I’ll take you one step farther.

Step 6

Choose the blue circle layer and in the layer styles, choose Inner Glow. After this, you can merge both layers together and add a dropshadow underneath your blue orb.

So, as you can probably guess, this tutorial can come in very handy. This same technique can be used to create a realistic looking eye or a marble or even a crystal ball. It’s versility comes in handy, but over and above, we can have the most fun with this shape if you ‘tune’ in next week for my next edition of NinkyNoo’s How To’s when I’ll be introducing my favorite, and might I say quite festive, photoshop trick! Bye for now.