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Glowing christmas ball tutorial

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial I will show you how to make a shiny glowing christmas ball in just a few easy steps.

This might look more complicated then it really is, this effect is mostly build up by a simple elliptical shape with three different reflections to give the effect of some depth.

Start by making a elliptical shape on your stage, the color doesn't matter we will change it later. In the layers panel double click the new shape layer to get to the layers styles panel and give it a gradient as shown below.

Now make a new layer and name it reflection 1, hold down ctrl and click the elliptical shapes layer in the layers panel to load a selection around it, now with the selection tool use the intersect with selection and drag as shown below.

Now you will have a selection part like this.

With the gradient tool make a gradient going from white to transparent and drag it in your selection so you get a result like the one below.

Now we will make our second reflection, so make a new layer and name it reflection 2, again hold down ctrl and click on the elliptical shapes layer in the layers panel and with the selection tool use the intersect with selection and drag as shown below.

Again use the gradient tool to drag a gradient from white to transparent inside the new selection. Now you should have a result like mine below.

This third and last reflection is a bit more tricky, this reflection will be made up by 4 squares that we will wrap around our ball so it looks like it follows the curves.

So now make a new layer and name it reflection 3, draw four rectangles and place them as I did below (so they looks like one of those old windows).

Go to edit -> transform -> wrap and you can drag corners to wrap our reflection around our ball I have make a few screenshots of the process so you get an idea of what is going on.

Finally bring down the layers opacity a bit so its not all white.

This last part is very simple we will make a ground reflection so it looks the our ball is placed on some reflected ground.

Make a copy of our elliptical shape we made at the beginning, drag it down below our ball and go to the layers styles panel and flip the gradient as shown below.

Now we have to make this reflection blur out the further we get away from the ball, so make a gradient going from transparent to the color of our background, (in my case black). Drag it inside the ground reflection so you should get a result as mine.

One final touch is to go back to the layers style panel by double clicking the ball's layer and give it an outer glow as shown below.