Hi!.. Typography in different styles is getting very popular day by day. In typography people are using a lots of different styles and techniques to make it more stylish, eye-catching. People do a lots of experiments to create an awesome piece of work , I did the same thing and I found really cool new ones and today I am goanna tell u how we can create awesome smoke typography effect in simple steps using Photoshop CS 4 with the help of brushes and adjustment layers.. It’s a very easy tutorial and you will be able to do the whole process in 5-10 minutes.

Step 1

Open Photoshop and create a new document, I used 1920×1200 pixels. Then apply a gradient, you could fill it with a gradient or apply a Layer Style. I used the layer style, Gradient Overlay. Use Radial for the Style and #07090a – #202b35 for the colors.

Step 2

Add some text in white then go to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. Use 90º for the Angle, and 40 pixels for the Distance.

Step 3

Now go to Filter>Distort>Wave. use 3 for the Number of Generators, 10 and 346 for the Wavelength, and 5 and 35 for the Amplitude.

Step 4

Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use 10 pixels for the Radius. Then group the layer and rename the folder’s Blend Mode to Color Dodge. You will get a nice light effect.

Step 5

Create a new layer on top of the others and go to Filter>Render>Clouds, make sure you had black and white for the background and foreground colors, then change the Blend Mode to Color Dodge and go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All. With a very soft brush, 0% hardness and black color, hide some areas of the clouds layer. Use the image below for reference.

Step 6

Create a new Folder on the Layers’ Palette. Change the folder’s Blend Mode to Color Dodge and add a new layer in it. Then use the Smoke Brushes from Qbrushes . Select white for the color and paint over some letters. If you think the brush is not very bright, just click twice. Paint a few more smokes like the image below.

Step 7

Create a new layer beneath the other layers but in front of the Background layer. Fill this layer with black and go to Filter>Texture>Texturizer. Use 100% for the Scaling and 4 for the Relief. For the Texture use Canvas and Light use Top. That will add a nice texture to the image but you will need to change the opacity to 10%.

Step 8

This is a nice new feature in the new Photoshop CS4, actually there’s nothing new just the Adjustments palette, but it’s very useful because you can edit all the image adjustments like Levels, Hue & Saturation, Curves in that palette. However it just adds a Adjustment Layer, that could be done in the previous versions too.

Anyway, on top of the other layers just add the Invert adjustment. You can go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Invert. It will be the same. You will get a very nice effect, like burning paper.

Conclusion

One of the best things in Photoshop is the Brushes Engine and all the things we can create with brushes. With so many excellent sites with Brushes like Brusheezy, Tutorial9, QBrushes, Designscollage, DeviantArt, and PSDTUTS we can find practically all sorts of effects and elements ready to be used in our designs. That means we can focus on ideas rather than figure out ways to recreate things. Also we have 2 very different effects with just one adjustment layer, the Invert. Once again, it’s all about playing. I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial, and let me know if you have any questions.

Did ever hear about digital painting?… Well, since you are reading this article, If you are designer I assume you’ve already heard about it. Unlike the traditional painting, digital painting makes use of digital tools such as Adobe Photoshop, illustrator, etc . It also differs from the regular images that we create in Photoshop because of its realistic effects and styles.

Now a day’s digital paintings are getting very popular. We have listed 49 Stunning Digital Painting Tutorials for those designers out there who wants to try this type of art. Read through the tutorials below and gain useful tips to master the technique… hope u like it!

Spacecraft Prototyping

Making of the Lady Bird Sophia

Making of Bronze Dragon

Equilibrium

Make a Planet

Liberate your Colours

Making of Hecate

Spider Harp

Death Blow

Making of “My Prince”

Painting Human Lips

Original Comic Covers

Making of Funfair

Drawn of the Dead

Painting of a Faerie Scene

Making of Lida

Old Style Pin-Up Art

Painting Clouds

The Abstract Dragon

Portrait Speedpainting

Paint Realistic Looking Lips

Digital Painting Tutorial

The Taming of Naas

SciFi Environment Concept

Boudicca 3060 A.D

Assault Chick

Superbad

Fabric & Costume

Children’s Book Illustration

Making of Fire Energy

Feathers and Angel Wings

Spanish Girl

Making of Yuka

Paint a Sexy Siren

Illustration Workflow with Nick Harris

Create a Robot Concept

Bioshock Videogaming Digital Painting

A Traditional Approach to Creating Digital Art

Painting Realistic Hands

Old Man

Revising Golongrias Picture

Wonder Woman Pin up Digital Painting

Cold Sky

Making of Naughty Robot

Howling

Happy Like a Broken Doll

Making of Three Line

Scene Rendering

Hi! Today we are going to share some info about html5 which is very power full tool nowadays and make its comparison with flash. So essentially, as more and more browsers start supporting HTML5 and of course we’ll find IE at the last in this race (like always), Flash has got to come up with something worthwhile, otherwise it will be obsolete real soon.

Today we have some awesome work examples by Hakim El Hattab. This is the creative lab and interactive playground of Hakim El Hattab. Dedicated to the exploration of interaction, visual effects and technologies. Hope u like it…

Sinuous

A game built using canvas which will test your mouse pointer reflexes.

1. Sinuous 01

Bakemono

A little monster that I brought to life with JavaScript. Bakemono is Japanese for monster.

1. Bakemono 01

Keylight

A playhead travels between keys which resonate in sound depending on where they are placed in the room.

1. Keylight 01

Blob

Soft blobby physics. It’s like, you know… jelly?

1. Blob 01

Magnetic

Control and create currents of particles which react to magnetic nodes.

1. Magnetic 01

Trail

Particle movement patterns that generate smooth trails.

1. Trail 01 2. Trail 02 3. Trail 03

Particle Depth

Particle positioning patterns using depth.

1. Particle Depth 01

Wave

A wave with bubbles floating on the surface, the bubbles each represent a tweet with the word “water” in it.

1. Wave 01

Particles

Particles slide across the screen and grow as they get close to the mouse.

1. Particles 01 2. Particles 02

There are a lot of promotional sites to promote your posts and articles.If you submit your post or article or news on each of those sites regularly you can get a huge traffic of new and regular visitors in very short time. You can get many unique visitors on you site or article daily using this method. Also if you use this method, you will get very strong back links which are good for SEO.

In this post, I am listing down the 120 promotional websites where you can promote your designing and other articles. There are most of sites in which some sites are free and some sites require registration I m going to list down all. Hope u like it…

Hypesol | Registration Required

Tutorials Palace | Direct Submit

Design Dazzling | Direct Submit

SpankingTech | Registration Required

W3Promoter | Registration Required

SlashDot | Direct Submit

WordTaps | Registration Required

faqpal | Registration Required

OurTuts | Direct Submit Middle Sidebar

webdesigntuts | Direct Submit Middle Sidebar

Psdtuts | Submit Link Page

NetTuts | Direct Submit

Vectortuts | Direct Submit

AeTuts | Direct Submit

cgtuts | Direct Submit

Activetuts | Direct Submit

WPArena | Direct Submit

Myinkblog | Direct Submit

Design Newz | Direct Submit

PsDeluxe | Direct Submit

Noupe | Direct Submit

10steps | Direct Submit

Fuelyourcreativity | Direct Submit

InstantShift | Direct Submit

Colorburned | Direct Submit

SmashingPost | Direct Submit

Designm.ag | Direct Submit

Devsnippets | Direct Submit

Tripwiremagazine | Direct Submit

Psdfan | Direct Submit

WebandDesigners | Direct Submit

Psdlearning | Direct Submit

HelpDeveloper | Direct Submit

Kailoon | Direct Submit

CssStyleme | Direct Submit

Crazyleafdesign | Direct Submit

Script&Style | Direct Submit

CssDrive | Direct Submit

NikiBrown | Direct Submit

Knowtebook | Direct Submit

Thecreativitywall | Direct Submit

CssLeak | Direct Submit

EliteByDesign | Direct Submit

DesignYourWay | Direct Submit

FBrushes | Direct Submit

Speckyboy | Direct Submit

Hongkiat | Direct Submit

thedesignmag | Direct Submit Middle Sidebar

Designshard | Direct Submit

Desizntech | Direct Submit

Freelancefolder | Direct Submit

ChethStudios | Direct Submit

Softalize | Direct Submit

Webdevcodex | Direct Submit

Woork | Direct Submit

Dezinerfolio | Direct Submit

BrushKing | Direct Submit

Dzone | Registration Required

Designfloat | Registration Required

Propeller | Registration Required

Zabox | Registration Required

Joyoge | Registration Required

Stumbleupon | Registration Required

Reddit | Registration Required

Digg | Registration Required

Delicious | Registration Required

Graphic-design-links | Registration Required

Mixx | Registration Required

CssCreme | Registration Required

Designmoo | Registration Required

PixelGroovy | Registration Required

Deviantart | Registration Required

Devmarks | Registration Required

Cssglobe | Registration Required

Abduzeedo | Registration Required

Pixelelement | Direct Submit

Designbump | Registration Required

Design-Related | Registration Required

BoogiesBC| Direct Submit

Naldzgraphics | Direct Submit

Tutorio | Direct Submit

tipd | Registration Required

scarletbits | Direct Submit

favshare | Direct Submit

pvmgarage | Registration Required

tweako | Registration Required

bloground | Direct Submit

design-newz | Direct Submit

Creative Cox | Direct Submit

webdesign-ne | Direct Submit

Top Roundups | Registration Required

servefault | Registration Required

The Web Blend | Registration Required

DesignrFix | Direct Submit

Mister-Wong | Registration Required

pswish | Direct Submit

inspiredn | Registration Required

QuandtNet | Direct Submit

tutsaz | Direct Submit

GraphicMania | Direct Submit

ElitebyDesign | Direct Submit

AdmixWeb | Direct Submit

Design Jojo | Direct Submit

DeveloperFox | Direct Submit

visual-blast | Direct Submit

DesignsHards | Direct Submit

espreson | Direct Submit

pixelactic | Direct Submit

graphic-design-links | Registration Required

joyoge | Registration Required

indeziner | Registration Required

2twitt | Direct Submit

Tutorial Out Post | Registration Required

folkd | Registration Required

favtutorials | Registration Required

cypherbox | Registration Required

buildinternet | Direct Submit

blogengage | Registration Required

arbent | Direct Submit

DDL | DDL Submit

Hi, today we are covering the new fundamental markup language for the web – HTML5 that you all love so much.

About HTML5, developers mean the new semantic structural tags like API specs, canvas or offline storage, new inline semantic tags and etc. HTML5, in fact, is intended at creating a complete markup language for front-end development, able to provide qualitative information on the different elements of the page. But to help make some sense of what’s new and necessary in HTML5, you could review some helpful HTML5 tutorials that go over many of the major HTML5 aspects and new standards. Here we have some tutorial collection. These useful HTML5 tutorials will help you keep a track providing more tips and tricks that you can use in your HTML5-based projects. Hope u like it…

Implementing HTML5 Drag and Drop: New Premium Tutorial

Blowing up HTML5 video and mapping it into 3D space

HTML5 and CSS3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using

The Power of HTML 5 and CSS 3

Coding Up a Web Design Concept into HTML & CSS

Touch The Future: Create An Elegant Website With HTML 5 And CSS3

Code a Backwards Compatible, One Page Portfolio with HTML5 and CSS3

Coding a CSS3 & HTML5 One-Page Website Template

Coding A HTML 5 Layout from Scratch

How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App

Design & Code a Cool iPhone App Website in HTML5

Structural Tags in HTML5

Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms

How to Make All Browsers Render HTML5 Mark-up Correctly – Even IE6

Hybrid Column Layout – Using HTML & CSS3 Only

Designing a blog with html5

How to Draw with HTML 5 Canvas

A Preview of HTML 5

The video element

Building a live news blogging system in php. Spiced with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery

My Top 5 HTML Coding Preferences

Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5

Create offline Web applications on mobile devices with HTML5

Rethinking Forms in HTML5

Wix is free online software that lets you build your own Flash website – and is a great tool for budding designers, small business owners, and basically anyone creative looking for a way to create a customized, high quality website without spending a fortune.

Wix’ website builder has a clean, graphic drag & drop interface.  With Wix, users can create a website entirely from scratch, or by customizing one of Wix’ stunning Flash website templates.   There are photography, business, musician, artist and e-commerce websites, filled with design elements suited to each niche, and can streamline a user’s design process.
To get started, browse through template galleries inside the Create section of the homepage. Click on a template you wish to edit (or select “blank website”) and add your own text, photos, links, music, etc. and customize the color, font, size, effects, settings, etc. of everything you see. Everything is drag & drop.

Use your own content or browse through Wix’ free galleries of clip art, photos, widgets, music players, Flash animation and more. Photos can also be easily purchased from Fotolia’s stock archive, directly through Wix. Upload videos from YouTube, 5Min or Metacafe, or from your own computer.

What makes Wix so revolutionary is the fact that the websites are fully compatible with search engine crawlers.  Despite Flash’s reputation for not being search-engine friendly, the programmers at Wix built their free website builder so that each website has an xml file, that mirrors the Flash code but in HTML. This HTML code is then fed directly to search engines.

Wix also provides free hosting, under the Wix domain. So you’ll get a free site with a URL that looks like www.wix.com/yourusername/yourwebsite’sname. Upgrading to a premium package lets you point your Wix website to your own domain, without the Wix URL. There are many premium packages to choose from, all at affordable rates. There are frequently promotional discounts and coupons.

You can totally let your imagination run wild with Wix. To really see what can be done with this unique web design tool, visit wix.com.  Explore what others have done using Wix, browse through the template galleries, and sign up for a free website account. Play around with the builder for awhile, customizing one of the free templates to gain familiarity.  You’ll find yourself having more fun than you ever thought possible.

More information on can be found at the website: www.wix.com.

Below you will find 15  flash websites that were created usign Wix. Hopefully you will enjoy with these inspirations.

Samuel Crowder

Black and Bird

The Dark Lurking

Chadoulas Designs

PicturesqueCo

Katrina Gelino Designs

Big John’s Mountain Grill

Marnie Alton

Dive95

Kiko

Shari Davies Illustration

Myles Grier

Daniliz

Soda Spectrum

BlackFly Media

Make Your Own Website with Wix

Get Some More Fans For Your Facebook Fan Page

Yesterday Facebook released a new application that allows you to place a Facebook Connect widget on your website that links directly to your Facebook fan page

This article will show you how easy it is to add a Facebook Fan box to your blog or website. What this means is that you will be able to attract more Fans to your Facebook page and your prospective fans will instantly see your stream and your other Fans and get some idea about what type of content you will be sharing them and it is also very help ful for attract traffic for sites.

Set Up A Facebook Page

You need to have a Facebook Fan page in order to use this application, just scroll to the bottom of your facebook profile and click on “advertising” and then select the “pages” tab and then select “Create A Page”, for more information on how to create a Facebook Page check out this blog post on AllFacebook  – “how to create a Facebook fan page to attract millions of fans” check out Mari Smiths blog post “how  to create and promote a Facebook fan page”

Once you have your fan page set up you can create your fan widget by going to your admin panel, from your page you just click the link Edit Page link that is below your Fan Page Image/Logo

Select “Promote With a Link Box” Box from your Admin Panel

Here you find the page with the heading like box you can also choose it from menu on left side. Here you have to be conscious in following steps and check fields carefully. Here you see your id in field named FACE BOOK PAGE ID and other fields  in witch u can adjust your box size number of user and appearance.

If u looks carefully up in to address Barr here you can see another ID which is different code from one in like box page id shown up in image.

Now copy the id from address bar and replace it with the id in face book page id box.

an press GET CODE button and will find the code

Copy  The Java Script Code

Now select all the code by highlighting it (CTRL A, CTRL C (pc) CMD A, CMD C (mac)) and copy it to your clip board. If you are a techie and want to find out a bit more about customizing your widget click on “advanced options” and you will be taken to Facebook developers where they have detailed instructions on how to add a fan box

Go to your blog and log into the admin section, for this example I am using wordpress but the technique should be similar on any other platform

Add A New Text Widget

From your dashboard , select appearance and then select  “Widgets”

Now create a new text widget.

Depending on which version of WordPress you are using this will be slightly different, if wordpress 2.8  just drag and drop a text widget to one of your sidebars and place it where you want it to appear. If your blog theme is enabled with footer widgets you might want to place it there as Javascript and Facebook connect are notorious for slowing down your blog load times.

Paste The Code Into Your Widget

Now paste the code from Facebook into your text widget and remeber to click Save

Now Go And See What It Looks Like!

When you need that user contact with you or send feedback to you via email then you have to need make a contact form. In this tutorial you will learn that how to create form with php script.

Overview

In this tutorial create 2 files 1. contact.php and 2. send_contact.php

Step
1. Create file contact.php.
2. Create file send_contact.php.

Step1:

Create file contact.php

View In Browser

CODE

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

<table

width=”400″ border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”3″

cellspacing=”1″>

<tr>

<td><strong>Contact Form </strong></td>

</tr>

</table>

<table

width=”400″ border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”0″

cellspacing=”1″>

<tr>

<td><form method=”post”

action=”send_contact.php”>

<table width=”100%” border=”0″ cellspacing=”1″ cellpadding=”3″>

<tr>

<td width=”16%”>Subject</td>

<td width=”2%”>:</td>

<td width=”82%”><input name=”subject”

id=”subject” size=”50″></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>Detail</td>

<td>:</td>

<td><textarea name=”detail” cols=”50″ rows=”4″

id=”detail”></textarea></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>Name</td>

<td>:</td>

<td><input type=”text”

size=”50″></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>Email</td>

<td>:</td>

<td><input name=”customer_mail”

id=”customer_mail” size=”50″></td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td>&nbsp;</td>

<td>&nbsp;</td>

<td><input name=”Submit” value=”Submit”>

<input name=”Submit2″ value=”Reset”></td>

</tr>

</table>

</form>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Step2:

Create file send_contact.php

CODE

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

<?php

// Contact subject

$subject

=”$subject”;

// Details

$message=”$detail”;

// Mail of sender

$mail_from=”$customer_mail”;

// From

$header=”from:

$name <$mail_from>”;

// Enter your email address

$to

=’someone@somewhere.com’;

$send_contact=mail($to,$subject,$message,$header);

// Check, if  message sent to your email

“We’ve recived your information”

if($send_contact){

echo “We’ve recived your contact information”;

}

else {

echo “ERROR”;

}

?>

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Apply and Comment …

In this Photoshop tutorial we’re going through some major steps to create a glass ball. The main goal of this tutorial is that you get an idea how to approach this and use these technique in other ways. It’s not that important to remember all settings, but it’s more important that you understand what’s exactly happening in this tutorial…

1. Prepare the document

Save the following image on your computer (right click on the image and select in Windows Save Picture As…).

For this tutorial I’ve chosen to go for a rather small file (640×480 pixels), just to make it easier for you to see what you’re doing.

Open the file in Photoshop. Add a new layer by clicking on the Create a new layer icon.

Grab the Elliptical Marquee toolfrom your toolbar and make a selection (hold down the shift key before you make the selection to make the selection a perfect circle) somewhere in the area and with the size that I’m showing here:

2. Fill the selection with the base color of the glass ball

Click on the foreground color in the tool bar marked with red in this screenshot:

In the Color Picker window that opens you enter the value D6D3C0 in the area marked with A:

Grab the Paint Bucket Tool and fill the selection with this color.
Press Ctrl +D (Command + D on the Mac) to get rid of the selection. You can also use the menu to do this: Select/Deselect.

3. Add a layer style

Go to the layers palette and click on the Add a Layer Style icon and select Inner Shadow and use the settings shown here (watch out: the color white is selected):

The result should look like this:

4. Add a gradient

Add a new layer by clicking on the Create a new layer icon .

Clip this layer with the layer underneath by pressing Ctrl + G (Command + G on the Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + G (Command + Option + G on the Mac) if you use Photoshop CS2.

A clipping layer only affects the layer underneath. You’ll see soon what I mean.

Change the background color in the tool bar and use the following color: 65645F. We’re now going to draw a gradient using the current fore- and background colors. Select the Gradient Tool in the toolbar (if it’s not visible, then look under the Paint Bucket tool ).

Take a short look at the next screenshot. Make sure that a linear gradient (B) is selected in the options bar at the top and that the option Reverse (C) is selected. (mode should be normal, opacity 100%, dither and transparency should be both selected, but in most cases they’re probably already having the right values)

If you don’t see a gradient that uses your colors at A which should look like this , then double click on the gradient in the options bar (A) and select the gradient from the list (most likely the first one) and click OK.

Start in the middle where you see the red dot and end where you see the blue dot (Just before the area where the main color is getting lighter).

The result should look like this:

Press the letter D on your keyboard, which makes the foreground color black, the background color white:

Add a Layer Mask to this layer by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon . Don’t you worry if it switches the fore- and background color when you do this, this is normal behavior. Note: If the fore- and background colors look like this after you added the mask, then everything is ok. If they are switched, then just click on the double arrow points icon to correct this.

The Gradient Tool is still active, but this time we need a Radial Gradient. Select the Radial Gradient in the options bar (the one beside the linear gradient (marked B in our previous screenshot of the options bar))

With the layer mask still active (It will have a double border), create a radial gradient by starting in the middle and stopping at the outher edge of our circular shape.

By this time we should you have something like this:

5. Add more layer styles

We’re now going to duplicate our Layer 1.
Click on its icon in the layers palette, hold down the mouse button and drag (A) the layer to the Create a new layer icon and release the mouse button.

The next step is to move this duplicate (that has now become the layer with name Layer 1) to the top of our layers palette; click on Layer 1 and drag (B) it all the way up until you notice a dark black line appearing above the top layer. At that moment release the mouse button.

Warning for users of Photoshop CS2 or later : it turns out that Photoshop CS2 changes Layer 2 back to a normal layer, one that is not clipped, when we duplicate Layer 1. To correct that make sure Layer 2 is active and press Ctrl + Alt + G (Command + Option + G on the Mac). Again, this should only be done in Photoshop CS2.

Make sure that Layer on (our new top layer) is active (you will notice the in front of it).

Set the Fill of this layer to 0% (A) and then double click on the Layer Style icon (B) to modify the Layer Style of this layer:

Use the following effects settings for the layer style. Make sure that all settings are exactly the same, including color or blending mode settings.

Inner Shadow
(pay special attention to the option Use Global Light, because it’s not selected! Also notice that we have a black rectangle beside the Blend Mode; double click it if yours is not black, to change its color!)

Inner Glow

After this our image should look something like this:

6. Add more volume

Add a new layer by clicking on the Create a new layer icon .

Select the Brush Tool in the tool bar.
Click on the area of the options bar that I’ve marked in red and select a 150px brush, with a hardness of 0%, which is the softest brush you can use.

Set the foreground color to white.
Click once with this brush exactly in the middle of this new layer (Layer 3). Now go to the menu and select Filter/Effects/Gaussian Blur… and select a radius of 25 and click OK.

Note: because we’ve blurred the white dot, white pixels might appear outside the area that we have defined as our glass ball, so we have to get rid of it. It’s quite simple and we’re going to use a little ‘trick’ for that.

With the top layer (Layer 3) still active we Ctrl + click (Command + click on the Mac) on the thumbnail of the layer underneath this layer (Layer 1) which will load it’s shape (the ball) as a selection and all we have to do now is to click on the Add Layer Mask icon and we’ve got rid of all white pixels outside our glass ball.

Now change the opacity of this layer to 30%. This screenshot also shows how your layer palette should look like at this moment:

7. Create a highlight

Add a new layer in Photoshop by clicking on the Create a new layer icon and that’s going to be Layer 4.

Select the Brush Tool and use a hard brush (hardness is 100%) with a size of 20. Change the foreground color to white (or a very slight yellow (close to indoor light) using a value of FFFFE8).

Place the highlight in the location shown here:

Go to the menu and select Effects/Blur/Gaussian Blur… and select a small radius of .5 and click OK.
Go to the layers palette and click on the Add a Layer Style icon to add a layer style and select the Outer Glow effect and use the settings shown here:

8. Add a shadow

First make the Layer 1 copy (the one above the background layer) the active layer by clicking on it; a will appear in front of it.

Now set the Fill of this layer to 25%

You’ll notice that by doing that, that we’re are getting closer to the final result:

If the bottom is too bright (marked with the arrow), then just select the Layer Style of Layer 1 copy and lower the opacity of the Inner Shadow effect (or increase it if that’s what you prefer).

We now click on the background layer with the newspaper image on it, to make it active.
Add a new layer by clicking on the Create a new layer icon .

With this layer (Layer 5) active we click on Ctrl + click (Command + click) on the thumbnail of the layer above (the one with glass ball, Layer 1 copy). The result is a selection in layer 5 that is based on this glass ball.

Press the letter D on your keyboard, which makes the foreground color black, the background color white

We’re now going to draw a gradient using the current foreground color (black) in combination with transparency. Select the Gradient Tool in the toolbar (if in it’s not visible, then look under the Paint Bucket tool ).

Make sure that a Radial Gradient (B) is selected in the options bar at the top and that the option Reverse (C) is selected.

If you don’t see a gradient in your options bar ( A), that looks like one going from transparency to black, then double click on the gradient in the options bar (A) and select the gradient from the list (the one right beside D) and click OK.

Draw the gradient by starting in the middle of your selection and end at the edge of this same selection.

We’re now going to transform this selection in an elliptical shape by using the transform tool. Go in the menu to Edit/Free transform or press Ctrl + T (Command + T on the Mac). A rectangular box with 8 handles will appear.
Now pull the upper center handle downward (see A) until you have a shape that looks like the one in B.
Now press enter on your keyboard to complete the transformation and press Ctrl +D (Command + D on the Mac) to get rid of the selection. You can also use the menu to remove the selection: Select/Deselect.

We now have to move this shadow to the right (B). Be aware that the arrow only marks the direction, not the distance.
Select the Move Tool in your tool bar.
To move the selection, click on the shape and while holding the mouse button move the shape in place. Have a look at screenshot C to see where you should place this shadow. If your shadow seems to jump while you try to move it, then go to the menu and select view and make sure that Snap is turned off:

Now change the opacity of this layer to 50%. In the menu we select Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur… and select a radius of 2 and click OK. On the right you can see how the layers palette should look like after you’ve done all steps (in this screenshot I marked the color of the shadow layer with yellow).

9. Deform inside of glass ball and shadow

n this last step we’re going to deform the image inside the glass ball. Make sure that our shadow layer (Layer 5) is still active and Ctrl + click (Command + click) on the thumbnail of the layer above (the one with glass ball, Layer 1 copy). The result is a selection in layer 5 that is based on this glass ball (like we did in step 8). Now got to the menu and select Filter/Distort/Spherize…
Select for Amount the value 100% and make sure that Normal is selected for Mode. Click OK.
The shadow is now deformed.

Make the background layer active and press Ctrl + F (Command + F on the Mac).
Note: Ctrl + F will always apply the filter that was used previously, in our case Spherize.

That was our final step and this is the result:

Tutorial Update – Improving the highlight

n this update we’re going to improve the highlight. Click on Layer 4 that contains our highlight to make it active.
We are now going to transform the highlight by pressing Ctrl + T (command + T on the Mac) and entering a value of 65% for Horizontal Scale (A) and a value of 45 for Rotation (B) and press enter twice:

This makes the highlight look more like an actual part of the ball:

t’s important to know that you have to select a background with colors that are not the total opposite of the colors we selected in the beginning of our tutorial when you want to use this technique.

You can make the ball even more realistic by adding more highlights or reflections. For the purpose of this tutorial I’ve kept it simple by adding just one single highlight.

Also be aware that once you deform the shadow or inside of the ball that you’re not able to move the ball, since both deformations are of course in a way “connected” to the background. So make sure that the glass ball is in the right place, before you start with the deformations. Make sure that your background is not to plain. A real glass ball doesn’t look cool either on white piece of paper in front of a white wall. Always try to use the environment to strengthen the effects you’re using to make the result look more realistic.

Eye catching may be a trendy but beautiful abstract backgrounds in a very high resolution. Most interesting thing is just click on image & Download your selected Abstract or Background.