Good looking spheres in PSP

(PSP Version 5 and above)

This tip is a continuation of the previous one in which I showed you how to create spheres in PSP.
If you have followed the steps in the previous tip, your final image would be made up of two layers; the bottom layer is the background color while the upper layer contains the sphere.

Adding a shining spot
Activate the Magic Wand tool and in the Control Palette change the Tolerance to 5 and Feather to 2.

Click on the layer containing the sphere at x = 57 and y = 57 co-ordinates.

Add a new layer by either clicking on its icon in the Layer Palette or Layers - New.

Select this new layer and fill the selection with white (R=255, G=255, B=255 or #FFFFFF) color. Make sure that the Fill Style is set to Solid Color in the Control Palette. The image should now resemble:

Deselect the image (Selections - Select None). Apply the Blur More filter twice (Image - Blur - Blur More). Here is the final result. Cool!

Note: The final image consists of three layers. The top most contains the shining spot, the middle contains the sphere and the lowermost has the background color.

Adding a glow around the sphere
Activate the layer that contains the sphere. Click on the Magic Wand tool . In the Control Palette, change both the Tolerance and Feather values to 0.

Click on the black background.

Invert this selection (Selections - Invert) and expand this selection by 2 pixels (Selections - Modify - Expand).

Activate the lowermost layer (the one that contains the background color) and fill the selection with a color for the glow. I chose white.

Deselect the image and apply the Blur More filter (Image - Blur - Blur more).

Just an example