NonDisjunction Glass Effect

Learn how to make the glass effects used on the orbs and ovals of the NonDisjunction themes for AstonShell, LiteStep, RainMeter, and RainLendar using PhotoShop 6.0.

NonDisjunction Glass Tutorial

Make some great lookin’ glass…

Learn how to make the glass effects used on the orbs and ovals of the NonDisjunction themes for AstonShell, LiteStep, RainMeter, and RainLendar using PhotoShop 6.0.

NonDisjunction Glass Photoshop Tutorial

.: by mrbiotech

In this tutorial I’ll discuss the general principles of the glass effect, as well as walk through the layer-styles in the making. I’m assuming you can do rudimentary tasks in Photoshop, such as using the circular and square selection tools, select specified colors from a palette, and creating and using Layers. If those items are currently beyond your capabilities, it’s strongly recommended that you read PhotoShop’s included help files regarding selections, color, and Layers.

Also note that I am using an older version, but chances are if you’re using 6.0 or above it will work just fine.

General technique:

Rather than employing a filter-intensive set of techniques, I’ve relied heavily upon Layer-Styles to quickly generate graphics by simply painting and filling. This lets you generate a reusable layer-style that can quickly be applied or even changed.In this scenario, we’ll create the glass orb in three layers, one that contains the color as a background, one that adds a soft, rounded shine, and one that contains a harder-edged shine that we’ll render partially by hand. Then we’ll create a metallic looking rim, a grey back-drop, and add some overlayed accents to the orb for additional detail. Each of these layers will have its own unique layer-style which I will explain in more detail.

Protocol:

Ensure that you have your layers palette open (Window->;Show Layers).

1. To begin, open PhotoShop and create a new file (Ctrl+N) that is 60×60 pixels in height and width, and with a transparent background.2. In the Layer’s palette, you’ll see Layer 0: use the circular selection tool and set the selection style (at the top of the Photoshop window) to “Fixed Size” and set the Width and Heigth both to 50 pixels. Make sure the “Anti-aliased” checkbox is checked and “Feather” is set to 0, then make a circular selection centered in Layer 0.

3. Select the Paint Bucket Tool (press G or SHIFT+G, depending on if you previously had the gradient tool enabled), set your foreground color to 004A80, and fill the circular selection. If you really want to make sure it’s centered, you can press CTRL+A, which will select the entire image, then go to LAYER->ALIGN TO SELECTION->VERTICAL CENTERS, then LAYER->ALIGN TO SELECTION->HORIZONTAL CENTERS, then press CTRL+D to deselect. Should look like:

4. To add/modify the layer-style for Layer 0, simply double-click it in the Layers Palette. The Layer-Style dialog will open and present you with the first panel of several: Blending Options: Default. These will remain untouched. The key to the orb-like background is the direction of light. We’ll assume throughout this tutorial that our light is coming from 135 degrees for sake of consistency.

4a. Check the “Bevel and Emboss” box then click on the letters for “Bevel and Emboss” and set the following parameters:

So what does all this mean? Since our light is coming from 135 degrees, we want the illusion of depth in the back of the sphere, so we’ve used the bevel effect with a high incidence to create an opposing light-source to lighten the lower-right portion of the sphere. We’ve also disabled the bevel effect’s shadow, because we’ll be using the Inner Shadow to do that.

b. Now click the words for “Inner Shadow” on the left to activate it and pull up its list of parameters. Set them as follows:

• Blend Mode: Multiply (default)
• Opacity: 75% (default)
• Angle: 135 degrees
• Use Global Light: Checked (check this, and then change the angle to 135)
• Distance: 12
• Choke: 0
• Size: 27
• Contour: Linear (default)
• Anti-aliased: unchecked (default)
• Noise: 0% (default)

This will create a subtle and broad shadow within the sphere, almost making it look inset into the background. Don’t worry, the shine we’ll add on a different layer will make this look more natural and 3D in nature.

c. To further enhance this effect, we’ll created some additional darkening around the interior of the ring using the Inner Glow style. Click the words “Inner Glow” in the left column to pull up its options. Set it’s parameters as follows:

• Blend Mode: Normal
• Opacity: Noise
• Color or Gradient: Color- Black (default)
• Technique: Softer (default)
• Source: Edge
• Choke: 0px (default)
• Size: 5px
• Contour: Linear (default)
• Anti-aliased: either option is fine
• Range: 50% (default?)
• Jitter: 0% (default?).

d. Let’s add some subtle texturing as well for kind of a rippled effect. Click the words for Pattern Overlay in the left column and set it as follows:

e. To brighten up the color a little bit I used the Color Overlay section with the Blend Mode set to Screen, opacity 100%, and the color set to a lighter shade of blue (#4E80E6). By selecting a different color you can quickly make alterations to the sphere’s appearance without having to repaint the original. Whenever you reselect an anti-aliased shape and re-fill it with a color, it becomes progressively less anti-aliased and the edges become perceptibly more blocky.

f. To further enhance the 3D effect we’ll make it appear raised off the back surface by adding a slight Drop Shadow from the left column. Everything here’s default, except for the Distance and Size, which have been decreased from 5 to 4. You can set this much higher if you want the orb to appear like it’s actually hovering over the back surface instead of being set into it. I tend to keep the Distance and Size matched (4:4, 6:6, 10:10, etc.) although play with it to see what you like.

g. Finally, I opted to add a 1 pixel ring of black around the orb to distinguish it further from the background. This is done using the Stroke option in the left column, set as follows:Size: 1Position: Outside.Blend Mode: Normal (default).Opacity: 100% (default).Fill Type: Color (default).Color: Black.

So now, you should have one layer (Layer 0) which should look something like this:

Not much to look at yet, but we’re ready to “glass it.” If you like, you can save all the things you just did as a specific Layer-Style that you can apply to anything you draw in PhotoShop. On the Layer-Style Dialog, simply click the “New Style” button and name it. You can pull it up in the Layer-Styles palette from now on! Click “OK” to close the dialog, and on to the next layer!…

Now that we’ve created the “inside” of the glass orb, we’re going to create our glass effects by using two additional layers, one using a hard-edged shine rendered partially by hand, and another using a shine created entirely by a LayerStyle.

We’ll need to duplicate the layer by RIGHT-clicking it in the Layer Palette, selecting Duplicate Layer and renaming it “Shine.” (This can also be done by dragging the layer in the palette to the New Layer button at the palette’s bottom). Then erase the Layer-Style from it by RIGHT-clicking the Shine layer, and selecting “Clear Layer Style.”

Double-click the Shine layer to add layer styles to it. The Layer-Style dialog pops up on it’s front page. For this layer, we will be modifying some of these options, but first let me explain the general layer rationale: We want a soft-shine to emulate light falling on a bubble-like surface from 135 degrees with a high degree of incidence. We also want it transparent so we can still see all the great work we did on the first layer. For this purpose, on the Blending Options page of the Layer-Style, we’re going to set the Fill Opacity to 0% while retaining the normal opacity at 100%. The sphere that occupies the layer becomes invisible, but any layer-styles we add to it will still be visible.

Now select the Bevel and Emboss options as we did above and set it and the contour as the following pictures indicate. Note the light direction at 135, similar to what we used previously, although the incidence has been bumped up to 72. An analogy for the incidence might be the sun traversing the sky: it may cross your path at a 135 degree angle throughout the day, but at sunrise and sunset the incidence is very small, sun being at the horizon. At noon, the incidence is almost 90 degrees, with the sun directly above you. That’s what we’re doing with the light source for the bevel, giving it a higher incidence so the highlights and shadows will come off the sphere’s edge and collect in a nice roundish shine-spot. The Contour panel is a subset of the Bevel and Emboss which dictates how the bevel is rendered, and can come in quite handy for button designs (maybe we’ll do a tutorial on that later). Activate it and set it like shown below:

Now you should have an overall picture more like this:

It’s an okay glass effect, thus far, but we’ll add another layer above this one to enhance the gleam of the “glass.” Next page; next layer…

6. To make the glass more life-like, we’ll add a secondary shine effect, similar to what most other online tutorials offer.

a. Create another layer above the other two from scratch by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N or pressing the New Layer button on the palette. Name this one “HardShine.” Make sure it’s the top-most layer in the stack. If it’s not, you can drag it above the other two layers.

Select white as your foreground color (handy shortcut: press D and then press X). Make sure your Wand Selection Tool has anti-aliasing enabled by pressing W, then ensuring that Anti-Aliased is checked at the top of the Photoshop window. CTRL+click on one of the layer’s you made earlier. This will create a selection based on the content of the layer clicked. Reselect the HardShine layer by clicking it. Next, in the menus up top, go to SELECT->;MODIFY->;CONTRACT and contract your selection by 2 pixels. The go to SELECT->;FEATHER and feather by 1 pixel. This will create a more fuzzy edge to the selection area. Now press G to select your paint-bucket tool (also make sure it’s setting for Anti-Aliasing is checked) and click in the selection to fill it with white. Notice the faded edge? That’s what all that Select/Feather crap was about.

b. Now select the Eraser tool and set it’s Mode to BRUSH, and it’s brush to PAINTBRUSH, and select a brush with diameter approximately 13 pixels. With your erase opacity set to 100%, erase an S-shaped curve across your white circle a little more than halfway down. Erase all the white below that, also. Mine looked like this:

Now we’ll enhance this with LayerStyles.

c. Double click on the HardShine Layer we just modified to add a layer-style to it. On the Blending Options Panel, reduce the Opacity to about 40-45%, and reduce the FILL OPACITY to 0%.

d. Now activate the Gradient Overlay panel in the Layer-Style dialog. Set the Blend Mode to SCREEN, with an opacity of 100%. Click the little Down arrow to the right of the gradient and pick the gradient called “Foreground to transparent” (mine’s the second default gradient, although yours may be different). Set the Style as “Linear”, Aligned with Layer, and an angle of -90o. Leave the scale as the default 100%. Hit OK to close the dialog box. You’ve just taken the white shape you made and turned it into a subtle white gradient fading from top to bottom.

So now you’ve got something that hopefully resembles this image:

This is the essence of the glass effects used in the themes NonDisjunction, Singularity, Prion and SEQ! By using layerstyles, the effects are stored and can then be applied in other projects, on different shapes and colors.

To add some details beyond the glass effect, check out the next page for the gray background, and the styles used by the logo over the orb…

Generally, I’ll apply another level under all the above ones that has the same circular shape underneath all the previous layers with a wide external bevel, and another layer behind that one as a base. For added effect, you can create a logo on a top layer, make it’s layer style SCREEN or OVERLAY, and knock it’s transparency down to 30-60%.

a. Here are some sample settings I used for a bevel effect on a layer copied from the first one we made, minus the original layer styles:
!http://www.skinyourscreen.com/server/e107_images/articles/mrb-tut-ndglass/NDring-bev.gif!\

b. To create the backmost base, I created a new layer underneath the others, filled the entire thing with a 15-50% grey color, and applied the following layerstyle:

If you wish to add a transparent logo, create a new layer above all the others and using your shape tools, or whatever method is comfortable, design you logo or text. Then apply the following layer-styles to it:

Here’s how mine turned out using the NonDisjunction Logo drawn in white:

Fun variations can be produced by duplicating shine layers, or copying a shine layer and switching its bevel from UP to DOWN, for an underlit effect in conjunction with a top-shine.

If this tutorial was useful to you, please leave a comment.

If you got lost- please leave a comment.