This tutorial has been developed using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 however you can transfer the 3D transform plug-in onto Photoshop CS & CS2.
1: Make a new document, none of these options really matter much so long as it's a square of sorts.. and its RGB Color, your choice.
2: There are two ways of doing this. 1st way produces the balls in a river of liquid metal, second one creates them by themselves. (For the second way, refer to the bottom of this tutorial under the extra options.) Change your foreground colour to a light grey and your background colour to a darker grey, quite dark.
3: Now select the gradient tool and drag a perfect (hold shift) diagonal line across the page from top left to bottom right.
4: After doing this it's mostly always going to be different shaped from here. Go to Filter > Render > 3D Transform and select the sphere tool (N). Now drag out a decent amount of small circles apart from each other. You don't want them overlapping, add some occasional larger ones. This will be the “Chrome Balls” in the river of metal. Now select the Trackball tool ® and twist the balls so they look like golf balls. Press OK.
5: Now once this is done go to Filter > Sketch > Chrome. You can use whichever options here you want to make the desired effect, now OK this and there you have the basic ones.
Done. Here is my final effect.
Alternate options:
After finishing this piece of work, you can fiddle with the opacity, which gives quite a good effect. Also the levels (Ctrl + L) move the right arrow to the left until it gets lighter, gives quite a cool effect. You can also add an outer glow to this picture (Right click the layer and fiddle with the options in there.)
2nd way of doing this.:
Don't bother with the gradient just make the balls and chrome them. Then they come without the messy river of metal.
Enjoy.
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