Glass: A photoshop tip

OK, shall we jump right into this? I was asked recently on my forum to get off my ass and right a new tutorial, this one explaining those pretty glass balls found on several of my pages.

I'm going to assume you know some of the possibilities of the Lighting Effects filter, I'll explain how I use it here, but only very briefly. Let's start with a three layer document - a background of gray, a circle of slightly darker gray, and a circle of black, with the layer set to "screen". (It's on the layer palette itself, usually it just says "normal". Check it out!) The "screen" option makes the black invisible, but that's... OK. :-)

The first thing we need to do is create a round ball. For this we will use the Lighting Effects filter, but before we fire that up we will need a mask for the 3D effects. I'll start with a circular channel, the same shape as the circle on the layers, cool? Working on that channel, let's select the round shape and fire up the "Blur/Gaussian Blur" filter.

OK! Blur that selection at 16 pixels, the first step. We follow this up with several more blurs, next at 8 pixels, then 4 pixels. Now DESELECT the shape, and do two more blurs, the first at 2 and the last at 1.

Better get used to this effect, I use this a LOT.

There we go! We now have a nice smooth mask for running the Lighting Effects filter on. The de-selected last two blurs? That was to eliminate any jagged edges on our mask. Now, leave the channel, and select the GREY CIRCLE on the RGB pallette.

Ready for Lighting Effects? Here we go, follow this link to check out the setting I used to get a nice spherical ball. You'll notice I have TWO light sources, those little specks, one yellow and one blue? The yellow one shows it's range, and this link shows you the dark blue light source, SHINING UP FROM BELOW. Very important detail here, this is how we get our interesting color variations.

And this is the result from Lighting effects. Kind of bland, and a little bit bumpy, hmm? That's OK, I expected this. The grayscale channel we used for the texture mask was limited to only 256 levels of gray, and we raised the surface by 50 units, leaving no room for a smooth transition.

We're going to use this to our advantage, because I also want the edges of any round object to get dark around the edges, even on the highlight area! This simulates the fact that a round thing continues curving away, BEHIND the area we can see! Toggle to the next screen to see the difference.

Cool, huh? Here's how we do it. Working on the grey circle layer, select the round shape. (Windows, hold the Control button and click the layer palette. Macintosh, use the Command button.) Choose "Select/Inverse", and you will have the background selected. Fill it with black. Choose "Select/Inverse" again, and blur the circle using Gaussian blur at 2 pixels. The surface smooths out, and a little bit of black leaks in! Now "Select/Inverse" once more, and delete that annoying black.

Try, please try, not to let your finger slip during this process! It can be a bitch when you realize you don't actually *have* that circular shape saved anywhere else, whatta bummer. (Note: That might be why I created that layer of black earlier on, hah!

Time for a big bold Lens Flare, found under the "Render" subheading. One of the things glass always seems to have is a powerful reflection, and if you have slightly bad eyes, or if you've ever looked at bright reflecty things with a camera, you get a flare. The same effect can be seen on foggy nights, go look at a streetlight, it's all around us.

I use a big flare on this one, burned into the black layer. The black layer has been set to "Screen" remember, so it's been invisible till now. Now when we put something bright on it, we find what it does. "Screen" will make black invisible, allowing everything else through, just like "Multiply" will eliminate white, allowing all the dark stuff through. Learn to use this, it shows up all the time.

And here's the results! Hmm, looks kinda ragged in this image, Lens Flare makes for such busy color variations, it hardly ever works as a GIF image. Check the next frame, where I've dropped it in as a JPEG and you'll start to see... Glass!

Really. Turn the page, it's there, waiting for you!

Ta-dah! There it is, glass! This is pretty much a typical "TV-screen gray" glass surface, you've probably seen it a lot. I added a minor 3D effect on the background to highlight the edges just a bit to show things off. We could stop here, many folks do, but you said you wanted GLOWING glass stuff, right? We're not done yet.

NOTE: Hmm, suppose this shape wasn't round, but was instead square, with rounded corners? This is that interface screen lots of you have asked me about, right here. You might want to take a break right now and go create one yourself, eh? :-)

OK, let's make this baby glow, all right? Working on the "gray disc" layer, let's just invert the thing, making what's light dark, and vice-versa. It's simple, just "control+i" for Windows, and "command+i" for Macintosh. Looks pretty weird, eh? How's this supposed to work for us?

First thing we need to do is darken up those edges, the edges kind of just vanished on us, but we can rescue them, and we need the dark at the top left, and the bright at the bottom right.