Start off with making a new document any size you feel comfortable working with, I made mine 200x130.

Click on your background layer and go to Edit >> Fill... and choose white as your fill color. Make a new layer, call it Ball Selection. Now select the Elliptical Marquee Tool, if you don't know where to locate this tool, click on the link below.

- Elliptical Marquee Tool

Hold shift and draw a nice smooth circle about the size of the one that I got.

Go to Edit >> Fill... and choose white as your fill color, press 'OK'.

Make a new layer on top of Ball Selection and call it Ball, now click on the eye of Ball Selection to disable it's visibility, we're going to need that layer later. Click the link below to see how your layers palette should look like at this moment.

- Layers Palette

Fill the Ball layer with some blue/purple looking color, I used #6B58DF.

In the layers palette, click on the tab called Channels, now while you're in Channels, click on the button called 'Save selection as channel', if you don't know which button I'm talking about, please click the link below.

- Save selection as channel

Click on the channel called Alpha 1.

Go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur... and use a radius of 6, then repeat the action Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur... and use a setting of 3, now do it one more time but as a final touch, a radius of 1. You can use other settings for your radius if you like, just make sure you always end with a radius of 1.

Then go to Select >> Inverse or press Ctrl + Shift + I, after doing this press D, now look at your Foreground Color, if it's white press X, if it's black don't do anything.

Hit Delete and go to Select >> Deselect or press Ctrl + D to deselect your selection.

Switch back to the Layers and click on the layer called Ball, now go to Filter >> Render >> Lightning Effects and copy my settings.

- Lightning Effects

Click on the button in your layers palette called Lock transparent pixels to make sure when you blur it, the edges won't fade to the background. If you don't know where this button is located, click here.

Now go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur and choose a radius of 3, repeat this and choose a radius of 2, repeat this again for the last time with a radius of 1. Again you can use other radius settings if you like just make sure you always end with a radius of 1.

At this point you can allready see a nice orb coming out of it but we're not finished yet. Right click on the Ball layer and choose Duplicate Layer..., rename this layer to Ball Overlay.

We're going to apply some layer styles to this layer, copy my settings.

- Bevel and Emboss
- Contour
- Stroke

Last thing to do is, make sure Fill in your layers palette is set to 0%. If you don't know where to change Fill, click here.

Make a new layer called Ball Bg, drag this layer on top of Ball Selection and underneath Ball, here's an example of what I mean.

- Layers Palette

Select the Ball Bg layer and Ctrl + Click on Ball Selection. Now go to Edit >> Stroke and use the following settings.

- Stroke

Press OK, now go to Select >> Deselect or hit Ctrl + D to deselect.

And as a final touch, some layer styles.

- Drop Shadow
- Bevel and Emboss
- Color Overlay
- Pattern Overlay (note: instead of the 1% in the screenshot, use 660%)

That's it! Hope you learned some usefull stuff from this tutorial. Click back to go back to the tutorial page.