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Glass Marble Photoshop Tutorial
This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to make a glass marble.

  Step 1.  
  First of all, create a new document with a width of 500 pixels and height of 400. Set the background to white and the foreground to a very dark blue (00182E was used in this tutorial). Create some clouds bye going to Filter > Render > Clouds (Image a). Use Chalk & Charcoal bye going to Filter > Sketch. Enter 6 for the Charcoal Area, 6 for the Chalk area and 1 for the Stroke Pressure.  
   
 
a)   b)
 
  Step 2.  
  Then use Emboss (image a), by going to Filter > Stylize. Enter 85 for the Angle, 58 for the Height and 297 for the Amount. Next use Bas Relief, by going to Filter > Sketch. Use 12 for Detail, 2 for Smoothness, “bottom” for Light Direction.  
   
 
a)   b)
 
  Step 3.  
  The full size of your image should end up with something like in the image below  
   
 
a)
 
  Step 4.  
  Next go to filter and choose liquefy. Set you settings to what they are in the image shown below.  
   
 
a)
 
  Step 5.  
  And now here's the fun part. Star to drag the mouse from different positions on the image so that it smudges. A good technique is to draw the outline of 3 or 4 squares and then drag across the lines of the squares. I ended up with the image below. It isn't too important how you do this, but just make sure to have some streaks of contrasting colors.  
   
 
a)
 
  Step 6.  
  Next resize the image to 250 for the width and 200 for the height (Image > Image Size). Then select the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools and set feather, from the top menu, to 7. Create a circular selection and then right click on the layer in the Layers panel.  
   
 
a)   a)
 
  Step 7.  
  Choose Layer via Cut and then create a new layer below the cut out layer. Fill the new layer with black. You can see the layers, that you should have, in image a).  
   
 
a)   a)
 
  Step 8.  
  Highlight the top layer, by clicking on it in the Layers panel, and then make a selection out of it, by going to Select > Reselect. Make a new layer, where a white gradient will go. Choose the Gradient Tool (image a) and then select the Radial Gradient, which is circled in image b). Select white as the foreground and then choose the Foreground to Transparent gradient (image c).  
   
 
a)   b)   c)
 
  Step 9.  
  Drag from the centre of the circular selection to the bottom edge, so create the gradient. It should look like the image below. From the layers panel change the opacity, of the gradient to 50%.  
   
 
 
  Step 10.  
  Next select the main layer below it and duplicate the layer. Apply a Gaussian Blur to it by going to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Choose the values shown in the image below.  
   
 
 
  Step 11.  
  The result should be similar to image a). Next, from the Layers panel, change the duplicate layer's blending mode to Multiply.  
   
 
a)   a)
 
  Step 12.  
  So, there you go, a glass marble! You can download the PSD file from < here >.  
   
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
   
   
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