Although creating a fisheye lens effect in Photoshop might seem very easy, using the built-in filters such as Spherize, the advantage of the technique I am sharing is that the original image remains fully editable and distortion-free, and any future edits do not require repeating the distortion effects.

Getting Started

Requirements: You will need Photoshop CS3 or CS4.

The first step is to open an image in Photoshop. If the layer says “Background” (in italics), double-click the layer, and then click the OK button (the layer will now be named “Layer 0″, unless you gave it another name). This gives the layer an alpha channel (i.e., transparency), which is essential for this technique to work. You won’t see the transparency yet.

Now from the menu choose Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object. This is the magic step that makes this technique possible. Again, you won’t see any change in the picture; the only apparent change is a small badge added to the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette.

Next choose Edit > Free Transform. A big “X” will appear across your photo. Immediately click the Warp icon in the control bar:

You will now see several lines crossing your photo, dividing it into nine squares. You will also see various “handles” along the perimeter of the image. You can drag these to warp the image. What you want to do is grab the corner handles, and pull them in. Pull them in until the lines on either side of the handle form a single straight line, and so that the corner point is halfway between the end points:

(If you have trouble visualizing where the midpoint should go, you can make a layer above or below this layer, and draw a big X across it with the line tool. That will give you a guide.)

Do all four corners the same way. When you are done, your image will look like this:

(My background is black because I created a layer filled with black and placed it behind. If you haven’t done that, you will see the transparency checkerboard instead. You can fill the background with whatever you like—on a separate layer!—or leave it empty. It’s up to you.)

We’re making progress, but there is still a bit more to do to complete the effect and make it look realistic.

Now you need to select the circle shape. The easiest way to do this on the Mac is to hold down the Command key and click on the layer. (Control key on Windows.)

Then choose Filter > Distort > Spherize…. Enter whatever value you thinks look good. Values of 70 to 85 seem to work well. This adds a little ballooning to the image, as you would have with a fisheye lens.

You will now have an image that looks like this:

These kinds of lens tend to go dark on the edges, so we’ll add some dark edging next.

Again, select the circle shape. Hold the Command key on a Mac / Control key on Windows, and this time click the the black and white Smart Filters mask, which is right below the layer in the Layers palette.

This will give us the correct selection, since the Spherize filter has actually changed the visible image shape.

Now inverse the selection, with Select > Inverse.

Create a new layer directly above the lens layer (Layer > New > Layer…). Fill the selected area with black, using Edit > Fill, and choosing Black as the fill color.

Without losing the selection, choose Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection. It will appear that the new layer with the black has disappeared.

The new layer has two thumbnails now; the layer contents, on the left; and the mask, on the right. Click the left thumbnail to highlight it.

Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a large number, like maybe 60. It will depend on your image size, which number will work the best. You should see the edges turning dark. However, at very high numbers, the effect will also become diluted. If you want to emphasize the effect, duplicate the layer. Don’t go too crazy with the darkening, though. Keep it subtle.

You should now have an image like this:

Now we are basically done.

But here is the cool part: If you double-click the thumbnail in the lens layer (Layer 0), you can edit the base image. You will see that the original image is still square. You can add layers, type, or anything you want. And when you close the original image window, and return to the lens effect window, anything you added will appear with the fisheye lens effect!

Here is an example, showing type that was added after all the steps were finished. You can see that Photoshop automatically warps the type to have the fisheye look:

If you want, you could even save this image as a template. Any new images you dragged into the original smart object would be automatically warped and shaded for you, without needing to repeat any of these steps.

The project is now complete. Enjoy!

Partly out of gratitude for their great resource, and partly because I think it looks like a great book, I recently ordered their Smashing Book.

It’s 300 pages of full color tips on effective website design and application techniques. You can read all about it on their website. And until late September, they are offering it at a special discount, only $23.90 postpaid within the U.S. (It will ship in late September.)

The original photo was shot in 2007, I believe. Even then, not all of the then-current board members were available at the time of the photo shoot. I arranged for one of my coworkers, Kenton Rogers, to take one photo without the missing members, who were added later when they were able to come and sit for a photo.

The original photo:

Kenton later added the missing members:

Unfortunately, that edited version was never published, because we had to postpone publishing the magazine into which it would have been inserted.

This year we started working on the magazine again. However, the members of the board had changed over the years. We could not get everyone together for another photo shoot, so we had to update the photo that we already had. It was necessary to remove four members, and add one. But since the photo had not been taken with that end in mind, this step was a little more difficult.

Besides the four deletions and one insertion, it was necessary to move other members to fill the gaps, add missing body parts to the people thus moved, and fill in backgrounds where they had been cut out. (Computer novices may imagine that if you move a person in Photoshop, their hand that was hidden behind a piece of furniture will magically appear, and you will see what was behind them. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. All those things have to be drawn, cloned, or otherwise added.)

The updated version for 2009:

It’s not a perfect arrangement, aesthetically. But considering what we had to work with, I think it turned out pretty well!

You can download the wallpaper by clicking here:

Notes on usage:

• Be sure to download the full-size wallpaper, not the preview image above. The size is 1024×768.
• Set the wallpaper as your desktop wallpaper / background image.
• However, DO NOT STRETCH OR SHRINK THE IMAGE. In your desktop wallpaper settings, be sure any option to scale/resize/stretch the desktop image is OFF. It is okay if the image floats in the middle of your screen. If you have empty space around the image, it is advised that you change the color of the screen to black or a neutral gray.

What you are looking for:

• On the right are color swatches. The top ones are shades of pure red, green, and blue (the primary colors of RGB monitors), as well as neutral gray. The bottom ones are yellow, cyan, and magenta, which are the secondary hues made from various 100% combinations of the RGB primaries. Make sure the colors look right, and grays have no color cast.
• The main part of the wallpaper is six large patches filled with various patterns. These help you catch moire patterns, crooked scan-lines, scaling issues (if you are not using your screen’s native resolution, for example), and so forth.

Descriptions of pattern tiles, left to right, top to bottom:

• Fine dots. Should appear an even gray. If you see something like the image below, instead, your display has moire or scan-line problems. Check if your monitor has a menu for geometry settings, and if you can fix the problem there.

• Field of plus signs. Lines should be broken vertically and horizontally. Gap size is one pixel. If you don’t see the gap, either there is image bleeding, or there is a scaling issue (non-square pixels). Additionally, the grid cells should appear perfectly square, not rectangular.
• Vertical lines. Should appear an even gray from a distance. If you are short-sighted, try removing your glasses and viewing your display from a few feet away; the top-right, top-left, and lower-center tile should all appear the same shade of gray. If you see bands, like in the image below, your display has geometry problems.

• Field of light dots. Similar to fine dots, above.
• Horizontal lines. Works the same as vertical lines, above.
• Zig zag lines. Should appear as a horizontal herringbone pattern. (To be honest, I couldn’t think of any more patterns, so I just put that one in there for kicks.)

Goals of the design included making it unique, appealing to kids, cheery, bright, fun, and easy to animate. We also strove for simplicity and contemporary colors and shapes.

After several stages of review, this is the logo design chosen:

The logo looks best on dark backgrounds which accentuate the glowing sun. In those cases, the grey lettering is almost white. However, for light backgrounds we also created this version.

There is also a 3D version of this logo that is being developed. In the 3D version, the sun is a sphere, not a disc. The letters may have a tube shape. However, details of the 3D version have not been finalized yet. When the 3D version is complete, it may become the official logo in place of the flat one.

“Music is part of your work environment, with most of you enjoying Jazz, Blues, and Classical music while you work.” In a nation dominated by rock, hip hop, country, and the like, it was interesting that in secular creative environments most people tended to listen to more mellow, melodic musical forms. Although part of this may be due to workplace policies against loud, aggressive music, it seems to suggest something about the nature of music to inspire. Personally I find that classical and meditative styles of music really get my creative process flowing, especially when I my creativity is at a low ebb.

“The telephone is your biggest distraction at work, then co-workers or clients, followed by email.” Isn’t that the truth. Sometimes I just want to lock the door and put the phone on do-not-disturb.

“It was insightful for us to see the broad spectrum of what inspires our customers. Some of you are inspired by the world, nature or God, while others are inspired by their families and friends. Robin Williams, Milton Glaser, Leonardo DaVinci, and Ansel Adams were among the many artists mentioned.” The main thing that impressed me about this statement is that enough creative persons mentioned nature and God that these were included in the summary. The variety of creative sources is interesting as well. The specific individuals mentioned are well known in the fields of acting/comedy, graphic design, art/science/inventing, and photography, respectively.

Another important part of composition is learning how to honor the subject. Although the background may be really awesome, if the subject is a person, the focus needs to be on them — even if it means cropping part of that oh-so-inspiring background out of the photo.

Consider this example, which I received for a 3ABN World article some months ago:

Before

In the photo, it appears that Rita is a midget; the top of her head doesn’t even reach the midpoint of the photo. You would think from this photo that the subject was an afterthought, and the photographer was more interested in an unobstructed view of the church behind. Not only is Rita situated very low in the shot, most of her body has been cropped out, leaving the background to dominate the photo. Even the less impressive parts of the photo — the dirt, the low bushes — have more space devoted to them. Looks like a job for Photoshop!

Although many people think of Photoshop’s selection and layer tools as a way to combine parts of separate images, they also work well for altering the parts of a single image. 

After

What we’ve done here is created a selection around the subject, copied it to a new layer, and moved it up in the photo. Although we didn’t have much of a person to work with, still in this setting she looks more important, more confident, and more up-close-and-personal. The church has not been altered or cropped, but now it appears more for what it is — a background object that merely provides context, rather than dominating the scene.

Of course, it would have been better to compose the photo correctly in the first place. But with a little care, we can improve the photograph without creating something that looks contrived.

This is where JES Deinterlacer comes in. This Mac-only application takes a video (NTSC, PAL, and other formats), and processes it to remove the interlacing. The result is a cleaner image.

There are at least two benefits to using this application:

1. You get cleaner stills, without the blur effect seen in interlaced images (see examples below).
2. You can use the de-interlaced video to create cleaner video for non-interlaced video formats, such as YouTube, podcasts, and just about any digital video format.

I’ve had great results with this application, and highly recommend it.

Here are some practical examples:

Exhibit 1 (top image is interlaced, bottom image is de-interlaced; click to enlarge to actual size):

C.A. Murray 1 - Interlaced

C.A. Murray 1 - De-interlaced

Exhibit 2 (note especially his hand in the foreground):

C.A. Murray 2 - Interlaced

C.A. Murray 1 - De-interlaced

The original image (cropped to the face—the whole image is much larger, but I wanted to show the details):

Brightness adjustments:

Color adjustments:

The eyes could not be salvaged from the original data, so I redrew them from scratch in Photoshop:

I stand at the edge of a small lake. It’s quiet here—a good place to meditate, to think. As I skip a rock across the water, I notice the ripples. At each point where the stone strikes the surface of the lake, waves radiate outward. Together they look like a series of points, each sending out signal waves in every direction. In a sense, that’s what this series is about. Our Christian heritage is a string of pivotal events, each with its own lasting repercussions in the stream of time. It’s a story that inspires me every time I think of it.

I thought it would be cool to add a little thumbnail illustration. I tried to look for stock photos of a rock skipping across a pond, but couldn’t find any. So Adam and I headed down to the nearest little pond, and this is what we got:

The original photo:

Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts, we couldn’t quite capture the feel of skipping stones. The surface of the water was really icky. We did get some nice splashes, but they just didn’t look like what I wanted to convey.

Add “Pond-Scum-Be-Gone” (aka, Photoshop):

Ripples:

A nice reflection:

Some nice early morning mist, and we’re done!

This is original photo was taken by my assistant, Kenton Rogers. The couple at the table are Jill and her husband Greg:

It’s a fine photo, and we could have run it just the way it was. But for this intimate candlelight dinner shot, I decided I wanted something more romantic. I also thought the lighting looked a little flat.

In this version, the highlights have been diffused, the candle’s flame is a little softer, and I added additional lighting around the candle and at other places to help illuminate the scene a little more dramatically:

Like many designers I know, I often set out with a general idea of what I want to achieve, but along the way I toy around with other possibilities. It is often through play and experimentation that new methods and styles are developed, and sometimes there are very pleasant surprises to be found.

While playing in Photoshop, I also stumbled across a technique that produced this image. Notice the very soft color transitions (especially the candle), the effect on the cabinet in the background, and the hard dark lines defining the shapes. I think it has a very artistic, painterly feel to it. Although I decided not to use it in the layout, I thought it was an interesting effect to file away for possible use on another occasion:

As you can see, I made three scenic changes: Colored the sky a bit, painted in the trees (yes, it was done with a digital brush, not a cloning tool), and greened up the grass. What do you think of the results?

Before:

After:

I am quite happy with this machine. It runs noticeably faster than my previous PowerMac G5, thanks to two dual-core (quad core) 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon processors and 2 MB RAM. Because it is Intel based, it can also run Windows at full speed; but I have not yet installed Windows on it. I also added a second hard drive, yielding over 400 GB of storage combined. Like its predecessor, the Mac Pro is beautiful inside and out (if you’ve ever seen the tangle of wires and mess of components in a typical computer box, the sleek and organized inside of a Mac Pro looks like a work of art). Adding the second drive was a breeze thanks to the slide-in drive bays.

There have been a few minor bumps due to PowerPC applications that did not work on the Intel Mac. However, most of those have since been resolved through free updates. And the remainder are not mission-critical apps for me. My most-used applications, including Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Microsoft Office 2004, run perfectly fine.