Advanced Orb

This tutorial is designed to teach you how to make some of the most advanced orbs ever seen by man.

Below you will see two of my latest orbs. By the end you will be able to create these in a matter of minutes.

Firstly, you are going to need a new document. open photoshop and create a new document about 300x300 pixels. This will allow plenty of room to work in. Now fill it with a nice light color.

Now create a new layer and get out your "Elliptical Marquee Tool" and use these settings.

With these settings you can easily create different shapes like the above. when you changed the settings it will then join any circles you created together. Cool eh?

Now created a new layer and do this again. But make sure it's smaller than the one you just made by 5-10 pixels. It doesn't need to be exact either. Check me example.

Now you should have a shape. Here's a day to add a shine effect to the orbs. Get out your gradient tool and set your foreground color to your orb color and your background to white.

Create a new layer and draw another circle a few pixels small than before. This will leave a gap between the shine and the edge. Drag your gradient tool and make sure the white is where you want the shine. Then use your blur tool to touch it up a bit and then change your opacity to what you want. Then repeat for other orbs... See example again

Here is where the effect come in. First start with your main background image which was the shape you created first. This will act as a border. Now add some effect and play around with it. Depending on your shape different effects will look better or worse.

I used these effects:

Drop shadow
Inner shadow
Bevel & Emboss
Color overlay
Stroke

(Turn the opacity down for stroke)

Keep playing around till the border looks good. See example.

This step is the same as the above. But this time we do it on the second shape we made. Which will be colored with the color you want the ORB to be. The effect used on this should only be inner shadow maybe stroke. You only want to make the middle of the orb look nice now. Some effects may mess up the border.

Other effects.

Select the layer which is the main orb and go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare. Now somewhere near the top of the orb place the lens flare. Make sure its some distance away from the orb. Otherwise you will get half of it really bright.

Finished.