Stroker

If you try to magnify small type in rastor the way the glass ball does in real life, you'll get a mess.

Simple example using Spherize attached.

I'm saying -
Rather than use the rastor in the photo, drop something else in with better resolution.

Make sense?
Or did I give away one of the tips you were saving for later?

edit:
I can't see the attachment. Tells me it's there, but I can't see it.
Hiccup?

Silky

Ok, well I managed to make the glass part itself, but I'm reading over stroker's tech slop to figure out how to do the distortion underneath. Right now it looks like a creamy ball not glass, but I did the reflection around the ball and the shadow underneath, so tell me what you think/ improvments!?....
Do you think the inner shadow is too heavy? \:]

Blinky2004

Yeah i get ya now Stroker. Cool. 8))

My suggestion would be to simply type out some text (or the same text) on a type layer at a huge size, then rasterize it and spherize/displace it.
Either that, or try to scale up a copy of the text part of the image for that purpose.

Patrick...
Nice attempt.
May i suggest you either lighten or remove the milky whiteness within the sphere. Otherwise, there's no need to distort the type through the sphere.

Silky

Keeper, I can remove the whiteness easily. It's just there because I made the sphere on a white bg, then merged and I moved it over to the text. On a white bg it looks clear though.

huma

patrick, that glass ball is amazing! [shocked]

Here's a quick attempt at the refraction.

First, I started with a medium grey background 200x 200.
Then I made a red to green sphere using the elliptical marquee and a circular gradient. Red on top. Green on the bottom.

huma

I next created another red to green sphere on another layer. This time right to left. Then the layer blend mode was set to hue. All the sphere layers were slightly guassian blurred to get rid of any sharp, pixellated jaggedness.

huma

This was saved as displace.psd to be used as my displacement map.
Here is the result, setting horizontal and vertical displacement at 200% within a circular selection. I also painted in shading, the reflection hot spot, shadow, and glass edging.

huma

I felt I was close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board. I created a new displacment map using Stroker's zoom cube tutorial as a base.

I remember that the frequencies of light bend at different angles through a len or prism, causing the rainbow effect, so that effect had to be duplicated also.

The refraction color effects were created by displacing the red and green channels different percentages with the displacement map after the initial displacement of the text layer.

Silky

Oh.....yeah, nice Moth. [innocent]
I'm going to try that right now.

retired_Craig

I have to say "Sorry for not seeing this sooner!!" Very nicely done Moth!! [righton]