Filed under Photoshop Tutorials - admin @ January 11th, 2006
| New Year’s Ball Drop |
| Illuminate your new year with a special new year’s ball that will be sure to brighten up your designs. |
| 1. Create a new document in Photoshop 400 x 400. |
| 2. Use the rectangular marquee tool to make a selection that will be the pole. |
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| 3. Use the gradient tool with black and white as the default colors and fill the selection based on what you feel looks good. |
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| 4. Now go to Edit > Stroke. Use the settings below. |
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| 5. Now deselect the layer and you will see the pole. |
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| 6. Create a new layer and use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to center a circle on the pole. Change the foreground color to a lighter gold and the background to a darker gold. Then select the gradient tool and change the type to “Radial Gradient” Look below to see where that setting is located. |
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| 7. Now fill the circle you selected with that gradient. Play around with it to make it perfect. |
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| 8. Now for the Sparkling Lights. Select the Elliptical Tool again. Make a new layer. Now make small little white dots all over the ball by filling in the small selections you make with white. I figured out the smaller the dots, the better it looks. |
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| 9. Now go to Blending Options and add an outer glow. Settings are below. |
 Click the image to see the full size image. |
| 10. You are all done now! Check it out below. |
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| 11. This doesn’t really look like a New Year’s Ball Drop unless you have some good backgrounds. I added in some different backgrounds to make the ball effect stand out! |
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| 12. And in case you were wondering, my inspiration for this tutorial were the new year of 2006 and these two images below. |
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