Posted on March 11th, 2008
Written by John and filed into the Basics, Brushes, Design, Web Graphics, Special Effects, Effects category.

In this tutorial I am going to run you through some blending options that will give you a nice glass looking orb, that would be a nice touch to a website or any other project.

First I am starting off with a canvas size of 483X200px to give myself plenty of room to work with.

Now I will make a new layer and put a simple gradient background. Pick your gradient tool and use these colors or whatever color you like. The colors I used are #196C93 and black #000000.

Now using your gradient tool in layer one hold down shift (so the line will be straight) and drag from top to bottom until you get a gradient you like. Mine looks like this:

Next I am going to make another new layer and pick my elliptical marquee tool:

I am going to draw a circle in the middle of my canvas and keep trying until I get one that looks like a circle. For tutorial purposes I am going to make this orb pretty big so you can see what it really looks like.

Now to fill the circle I want to use the gradient tool again, but pick different
colors:

Change your gradient fill to radial instead of linear:

Then fill your circle like this:

I really like blending options in photoshop because you can mess around with each one to get some really nice effects. These next steps will be all screenshots of blending options to pick. You can mess around with these on your own to get an effect you may like better.

Here are my blending option settings:

Drop Shadow

Inner Glow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay

Stroke

After choosing those settings you should have something that looks similar to this:

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