This tutorial will show how we can make use of the spherize filter to make objects appear more round and 3D. We will be demonstrating this and lighting effects by creating a golf ball from scratch.

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We will start off with a blank canvas with a black background. Create a New Layer and make a circle marquee selection the size of your golf ball. TIP: Hold SHIFT when drawing a circle with the Elliptical marquee tool to make it a perfect circle:

Next, fill in the selection with White, on the new layer we just created. Then open up a new document, relatively small, around 25x25px, and then draw a small black circle on a transparent background:

Now press Ctrl+A to Select All and goto Edit > Define Pattern. Give it a name if you want, and click Ok. Now let's go back to our golf ball document and double-click the layer we created to bring up the layer styles. Click on Pattern Overlay and choose the pattern we just created:

Click to enlarge.

We are probably going to want to resize our pattern, so use the slider for Scale to adjust. When you're satisfied, click Ok. Now create a new layer and drag it beneath our golf ball layer, then choose the golf ball layer and press Ctrl+E (Merge Down). This will merge the two layers and apply the Layer Styles. next, we want to goto Edit > Transform > Rotate, and rotate 45°, like so: (TIP: If you hold down SHIFT whilst rotating, you can snap to 15° increments).

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Now we make sure that the golf ball is still the selection, and then we goto Filter > Distort > Spherize. We will keep the default settings and should get something like this:

Making sure we still have the same selection, choose the Gradient tool and then we want the colors to be White and Black. Also reduce the opacity to 50% or so, and we want a Radial gradient. We are going to create a gradient from the center of the ball (White), to the edge (Black). We should have something like this:

Now we will want to press Ctrl+A to select all, and press Ctrl+Shift+C to Copy Merged, which will copy the whole document and layers, then goto the Channels tab and add a new one. Then we will paste into the new Channel. Then go back to Layers and click the golf ball layer to select it, then goto Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. And using the Channel we just created, we will do something like this:

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It might look a little dark right now, but we can fix it by going to Image > Adjustments > Levels. Mose the sliders to play around with the image and see what works for you. We come out with this:

Notice the edges are a bit sharp. We will add some Layer Styles to finish this off. You can play around with the Layer Styles, but for this example, I used a Inner Shadow, Color Overlay, and Gradient Overlay. Inner Shadow had Distance of 10, and a Size of 32; Gradient Overlay was Radial and had a Blend Mode of Hard Light and a scale of 134%. You should experiment with these values.

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