PhotoPaint 9 Spheres

Realistic spheres are easy to create in PhotoPaint 9. For this tutorial I converted a whole image to a sphere. It only takes about 3 steps before you have the sphere. Once that is complete there are many different things you can do to it. You are only limited by your imagination.

The first thing you need to do is to import the image you want to use into PhotoPaint. The image I used is below.

To make this all work out right the image must be square. So, from the Edit menu choose Resample. Alter the width to match the height if you have an image where the width is larger than the height. If you have the reverse alter the height to match the width. You will probably see a little distortion in the image but that's ok.

From the Effects menu choose 3D>Sphere. It's already looking pretty good but I thought I needed to spiff it up a bit more.

From the Effects menu choose Render>Lens. In the dialog that comes up you can set the color of the Lens effect and also its position.

To get the effect of the smoke coming in front of the sphere I used the Interactive Transparency tool from the top left corner of the sphere to the bottom right corner. I then adjusted the transparency using the bar on the line so that the bottom right corner was the most transparent.

I then added the "smoke" which is actually a sky with clouds. From the Edit menu choose Fill. Then choose Texture. Click the edit button and from the Samples library choose Clouds - Morning.

How much is too much? I don't know. I felt it still needed something so I added the butterfly from the Artistic media library.

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved