Expert: LizaL - 5/4/2005

Question
Hi LizaL,

I'm trying to work up my Photoshop knowledge. For a few days now I've been trying to recreate a logo you can find on http://www.lookandlisten.be/capital.jpg in order to get to know a bit more of lighting effects of objects. But I'm afraid nothing what I do comes even close to the example. Could you help me a bit out here? Also for making the word Capital curl around the sphere isn't that easy I think.

I hope you find the time to answer my question.

Best regards,

Kenneth De Buck

Answer
Hi Kenneth,

There are 1,001 ways to create a glass sphere in Photoshop, much like the one in your example. To simplify matters, rather than list out all the steps or create one and do a movie of it (which would result in a huge file for me to upload and you to download!), I've found several good tutorials for you to check out.

I'm assuming here that you've got a pretty good background in Photoshop -- these tutorials aren't the easiest to follow, so if something doesn't seem right, or if it seems like they left out a step, just holler (email address is below).

I followed these tutorials myself before I posted the links for you, and they seemed to work for the most part. I also tried to edit what might not be necessary to your project.


1. This one creates a glass ball -- along with some extra steps that provide some neat effects.
http://www.lunacore.com/photoshop/tutorials/tut009.htm

2. From the same site, here's also a very good tutorial on handling lighting effects:
http://home.versatel.nl/epragt/tutorials/photoshop/effects/shapelightning/index....

3. Same site again: round buttons
http://home.versatel.nl/epragt/tutorials/photoshop/shapesandobjects/roundbuttons...

4. Take a look at this one -- you could probably do just step 1 for what you have in mind:
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/orbs/orbs.htm

5. Here's a movie I created, where I made a simple 3D-type button -- it's about 6MB, so it might take a second to load:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/3d_circle.mov

Basically all I did here was create a circle holding down the shift key and drawing with the elliptical marquee tool, on a new layer. I filled the circle with red, then from the Layer pulldown menu, selected Layer Style > Inner Glow. I changed the glow color to black, and the blend mode to Multiply.

In the movie here you also see me playing around with the different aspects of the dialog box: choke will alter the darkness around the edges of the circle; but most notably, size and opacity will dramatically alter your circle to have a dimensional effect.

You can take this a step further -- you can create a new layer on top of this button, then create a foreground-to-background linear gradient, and drag it from top to bottom, using white as your foreground color and your same fill color red as the background color. Then select this layer, activate the selection, and use Free Transform (Edit pulldown menu > Free Transform) to make it smaller, and move it so the highlight is where you want it.


Now as far as the text goes -- simply put, there are also 1,001 ways to wrap text around a sphere in Photoshop! One of the easiest is to use the Warp tool, as shown here:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/text_envelopes.mov

Just type your text, stylize it as you wish (in your case, apply a metallic finish*) and then use the warping envelopes to wrap it around your sphere.


*To create metallic text -- you guessed it, there are 1,001 ways to do this too! Here are a few online tutorials:

1. From the aforementioned site:
http://home.versatel.nl/epragt/tutorials/photoshop/text/chrometext/index.jsp.htm

2. Chrome with a texture:
http://home.versatel.nl/epragt/tutorials/photoshop/text/chrometext2/index.jsp.ht...


All that said -- I'm on deadline with several freelance projects at the moment, and I'm going to take a few days off from All Experts. But please feel free to email me at lizal@little-works.com for further discussion, and especially if something I've said here doesn't ring true or make sense to you.

I'm also gathering together an online Photoshop class and if you'd be interested, send me an email and I'll send you back the particulars.

Thanks!

Lisa