This Photoshop tutorial features a step-by-step guide to creating a beautiful, glowing, floating color wheel poster. This is a poster was made to promote our creative agency Newfire Creations.

Now we’re going to do what’s called “masking” of the glowing color with the circle so all of the glows are trapped within the circle.  So here are the mini-steps for this masking process:

• Hold down the COMMAND button on a mac and click the black thumbnail in the circle shape layer. 
  
• After you COMMAND CLICK this thumbnail you’ll see what are called “dancing ants” around the orb that look like this:
• 

• Now go to Select > Modify > Contract and put in a value of 75.  The dancing ants should now contract to look like this:
• Make sure the flattened color glow layer is selected in the layers palette and simply click the mask button in the layers palette

• This should trap the colors inside the circle and leave a black border.

Step 7:

Now we need to increase the saturation of the color glow.  Push COMMAND+U and the hue/saturation dialogue box will pop up.  Increase the saturation by 100 as shown:

The poster should now look like this:

Step 8:

Now we’re going to duplicate the color wheel we just created/adjusted.  After we duplicate the layer, we’re going to scale it down and rotate it about 20 degrees.  It will be on top of the original color wheel layer and will give it a nice effect.  As shown in the picture below:

FYI – to scale down so the circle stays proportionately in the middle of the original circle old down SHIFT + OPTION as you click and scale down with the transform handles.

Step 9:

Now we’re going to add a simple highlight to the color wheel.  Create a new layer and with a basic circle brush with a 0 hardness, click in the center of the color wheel.  This gets rid of the pinched look in the middle and softens it up.  It’s not as harsh of a focal point:

Step 10:

Now we’re going to add a pretty shine to the orb to give it a polished look. With the pen tool, draw a shape that looks like a shine to you over the top of the orb.  Make sure the shape the pen tool is drawing is filled with white as shown:

After you have drawn this “Shine/Gloss” shape layer, flatten it by creating a blank layer above it in the layers palette and selecting them both (using the shift key and clicking) and pushing COMMAND+E on your keyboard.

Now…as in step 6… we’re going to select the black outer orb shape layer again and contract it by 20 pixels this time instead of 75 (Select > Modify > Contract).  This will create a shine between the black outer orb and the color wheel on the inside, adding a nice gloss effect.  Here is a picture again of the thumbnail you need to hold COMMAND and CLICK to get the dancing ants…before you contract

This is what it will look like:

Now we need to add a gradient mask to the shine to make it look… well… more like a shine.

• First, click the shine layer… then click the “mask” button in the layers palette
• Now select the gradient tool and select a simple linear black to white gradient…
• Now click and drag the gradient across the shine until you get the desired effect as shown below:

Step 11:

Wow! Doesn’t that look beautiful?!  Now all we have to do to finish the orb is unhide the glow layer that is behind the orb.  Do this and you’ll have something that looks something like this!:

Step 12:

Now we’re going to add a really sweet faded dust effect.  To do this we need to create a brush.  Open a new Photoshop file that has dimensions of 10 inches by 10 inches and 300dpi. Select the Ellipse Tool (U), and create a circle. Use black for the color, and go to Layer>Layer Style>Blending Options. Change the Fill Opacity to 90%. After that select Stroke. Use 38 pixels for the size, Inside for the Position and Black for the color.

Then go to Edit > Define Brush , give your brush a name and the brush is created.

Now you can go back to the original file where we were designing the poster and create a new layer.

Now, Go to Window>Brushes (F5). The first thing to do in the Brush Engine is to select our new Brush. The size won’t matter because you will change that when you use it. The Spacing, however, is very important. Chage the value to 100%. After that, select the Shape Dynamics, then Scattering and Other dynamics. For the values use the image below.

These settings can be adjusted by preference.

Create a New Layer and start drawing the circles across the art board.  Set the Blending Mode of the layer to Overlay.

Here is what we came up with:

Step 13:

That is it for the orb, and background.  Now all we have to do is add some simple text and a footer that you think will look good.  Again, these can be to your disgression.  For our footer we decided to duplicate the layer of the orb, flatten it, desaturate it, and repeat it three times across the bottom.  Hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial.  Leave a comment and bookmark it if you want.  Thanks for stopping by King Tutz!