Using surface textures from NASA and a bump map from another online source, I created a fully rotatable, 3D globe of the Earth in Photoshop CS4 Extended. It can be viewed or lighted from any direction. There is also a separate cloud layer I can turn on, edit, and move around. My master file is a very large image (6000 × 6000 pixels), more than ample to fill a full spread at 300 ppi.

Photoshop CS4 also has built-in features for creating red-blue anaglyph images. Below are a couple sample images I made. You will need a set of red-blue 3D glasses to view them correctly (you can also make your own glasses, using markers or red and blue transparencies you may have — or request a free pair (alternate link)).

This is the second version I made, with clouds added:

The 3D features in Photoshop CS4 Extended are a little tricky to learn, but once you get the hang of them, you can do some pretty amazing stuff.

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!

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!

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.

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!

It was created with a combination of SketchUp, Swift 3D, and Photoshop.

One trick was to create a picture in which 3ABN’s logo would look OK, once automatically scaled down and cropped by Facebook’s software. This was part of the inspiration for having a screen with the logo in the center, surrounded by other screens. To be cropped correctly, the logo must fit within a space defined by a perfect square with a width and height less than the smallest dimension of the image.

For the November issue of 3ABN World, we needed to illustrate a devotional article based on the famous Apollo 13 mission. After a futile search for a useful clipart image, I decided to take the plunge and make my own composition. Keep in mind that I do not have much experience in 3D — I think I could count my 3D illustrations on one hand — and I had only six hours or so across two days to work on this. Besides that, my tools were a clunky 3D application called Swift 3D 4.5 (nothing “swift” about it), SketchUp 6, and Photoshop CS2.

I found a number of 3D models. Interestingly, each one was different in various ways, including in regards to the colors and materials used for major pieces of the Apollo command module. So I compared them all, noted the common features, and also perused some online articles about the Apollo 13 mission (characterized by fuzzy, black and white images). In the end, I went for as accurate as I could guess, along with adding a few random stylistic elements that are almost certainly not true to life, but which make it look more believable.

Here is the base model that I downloaded. Note the absence of color and detail, and that the dish antenna is completely missing:

I added basic colors, materials, and textures in Swift 3D, and got the angle set to what I wanted. Then I exported it as a PNG image, and opened that in Photoshop. Then I added more color, shading, and texture. I also added lettering, rivets, the words “United States,” and other little do-dads. In the background I added stars (using a real photo of the night sky, not just random stars), and a view of Earth.

Originally I had added a dish antenna borrowed from another model, which I retouched in Photoshop. But I was not happy with the result. The new graphic below shows the new antenna that I made from scratch using SketchUp, Swift 3D, and Photoshop.

Here is detail of the craft:

Here is a small version of the final image. The full size one is 11 inches wide at 300 ppi.

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:

Can you guess how it was done?

Before:

After:

Note: The photos are not cropped the same because I decided to do this demonstration after I had already cropped and altered the photo, and I was in too much of a hurry to make the “before” and “after” crops identical.

Before:

After:

This version, with some modification, is used in the October 2006 edition of 3ABN World, which should eventually be available for download from 3ABN’s website.

Note: The effect I added of light streams on the inside of the window is subtle, and doesn’t show up so well at this small size.

I didn’t have any birthday cake this year (or last year, or the year before that, or the…), since there is no one around with a heart to make such a thing for me. So I decided to try my hand at making something in Photoshop, the challenge being to draw it from scratch without using any source art. This represents about 45 minutes (if I had more drawing experience, I could no doubt chop that time down; but drawing is not a regular part of my design job). Here is the result: