![]() The marble texture seems a little washed out.Below is a list of things I don't like so far. I rarely ever work on something where each step is the right choice and the final result is a clearly defined linear set of steps. It's time to sit back and just look at the piece and be honest about what I don't like. Also make sure the reflections adhere to the position of our light source coming from the upper left. Whatever shape you choose though, make sure it follows the contour of the sphere or it will look fake. You can reproduce this shape or create your own, it won't make a big difference. I will be using the pen tool for this step and following the same procedure as I did with the midshadows (with one or two different steps that I will point out). In other words we can just completely make this up. This can take on many shapes depending on the shape of the light source. Start with the most noticeable highlight, the light source reflection. When we create these new highlight layers their different opacities will interact and the interactions will create their own unique highlights. If you look back at our reference image you'll notice that the highlights have different degrees of sharpness and different distances of highlighting. Create a new group, call it "highlights" and create a new layer inside this group called "highlight source." When we create highlights we will also be defining the edges of our midshadows (you will see what I mean shortly). Once you have blurred the image, drop the layer's Opacity down to 70%. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and use 25px or whatever suits your taste. This will limit the blur to the edges of our orb. With our "shadow" layer selected Command-click the "sphere" layer again to get a circular selection. I don't want a crisp shadow so we need to blur it. ![]() This may take a couple of tries, but look below to see the shape I was happy with. Move the cursor to the upper-left and hold down the Alt key (notice the cursor has a little '-' on it now, it will now subtract from the selection). We want a crescent shaped selection so grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Go to Select > Modify > Contract and enter 20 pixels. I don't want the shadow to go right to the edge so I will contract the selection. Command-click the "orb bg" layer to get a circle selection. Step 8a - ShadowsĬreate a new layer called "shadow 1," with our new shadow layer selected in the layers panel. There may be a temptation here to use the gradient tool for lighting effects, I'm going to stick with the pen tool, burn tool, gradient masks, and maybe some elliptical marquee tool as well. I'll outline some of my approach here, but I encourage you to put your own interpretation on the lighting effects on the sphere. I will not try and copy the reflections, but I will use them as a spring board. I used this image as a reference, which comes from The Dimensions of Color. The first thing I noticed when examining a real image was how many subtle highlights and shadows a glossy sphere has. What we need to do is do an internet search for glossy spheres to find real images of highly reflective marbles or spheres that have a shine that is resultant from a real light source. Most tutorials are fine for creative website buttons or a slightly impressive glass ball that wouldn't really fit into any artistic context. There are tons of tutorials on creating glossy spheres, but what we are after is a somewhat realistic shine and shadows on our orb.
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