Orb Button

Step 1: Creating the Workspace:

Start with a 150 x 150 Pixel Document and fill in the background colour as a Neutral white #FFFFFFF

Step 2: Create the base layer:

Make a new layer and grab your Elliptical Marquee tool hold the Shift key on your keyboard and make a selection like so:

Fill in this circle selection with any colour and then go to your layers panel. Right click on the circles layer and select Blending Options. Apply the settings for the following:

Drop Shadow:

Inner Shadow:

Bevel & Emboss:

Contour Settings:

Satin Settings:

Gradient Overlay:

Phew! Lots of settings there! Now apply all of those and then click OK. Our circle should look like this:

Step 3: Make the inner section:

Now on the Circle layer Hold Ctrl on the keyboard and click the layers thumbnail. Doing this should select the circle layer's shape. Once it's selected. Go to Select > Modify > Contract. Contract the circle by 10px which should give you something like this:

Fill it with a Neutral White as a temporary basis:

Step 4: Creating the glassy effect:

Now you may remember a tutorial in the Orbs category that thought you how to create shiny orbs using Polar and Rectangular Coordinates. Well in this tutorial you will be learning it again as well. You need to be able to create a orb layer in another document and then drag the orb layer into this document.

So start with a new layer a 300 x 300 Document with a background of #333333 and you should do and follow these steps for the Shiny Orb Tutorial!

Create a lens flare by going to Filter > Render and then Len flare. Apply these settings:

Once you have applied these settings click OK and your document should look like this:

Listen up to the next part because this is where you could go wrong!

Go to Filter > Distort then go to Polar Coordinates.

And apply these settings:

Click OK and your document should look like this:

Next go to Image > Rotate Canvas and select Rotate 180:

Once you have done this you should up with something like this:

Finally go to Filter > Distort and the choose Polar Coordinates again but this time choose Rectangular to Polar like this:

Click OK and we should now see our Orb shape starting to take form:

Next we need to cut the orb out of it's current document and then place it into a new one. So Grab your Elliptical Marquee Tool and hold shift and make a selection over it like this:

Once you have a selection that your happy with right click within the selection and select Layer Via Cut. When you do this you should have a new layer in your layers panel like this:

Now we're going to create a new document for the layer we have just cut out so create another new document that's 300 x 300 and make the background #333333. Then drag the cutted out layer we have into the new document (that you just created )layer's panel. When you do this your new document should be like this:

You can now close the other document that we were using at the beginning of this tutorial. We now no longer need it.

Make sure the Orb layer is selected and then hold Ctrl + Shift + U on the keyboard. This will Desaturate the layer and you should notice a slight colour change on the orb:

Next go to Image > Adjustments and Select Hue/Saturation and apply these settings:

Once done your orb will have some colour in it and should look like this:

Now drag the orb you layer you have created into the button document. And shrink it down to size to it fit's into the button like so:

For a final touch up right click on the orb layer and select Blending Options. Apply this Inner Shadow setting:

Instead I chose a reddish colour for my button. So if you fancy changing the colour of the orb bit. Select the orb layer in your layer panel of you button document and go to Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation and make sure you tick the little box that says colorize. Once you've done that play around with colours here are some of my results:

The final result:

Download the PSD file here.