Quick and Easy 3D

I'd like to show you a little technique I like to use for a quick 3D effect. It is really simple and fast when you need some simple 3D on shapes. While it doesnt't work as well as some of the other techniques (we can talk about those later), it works really well for some.

I'm going to use a simple torus shape for this. I made it in Photoshop using the circle marquee tool. I simply filled a circle, made a smaller circle inside of it with the marquee tool and then deleted the center. Sort of like a donut hole punched out of a donut.

What you want to do is select the torus' transparency by Control (Command for Mac) Clicking on its thumbnail in the layers palette. This will create a selection around the torus. Now create a new layer by pushing the icon at the bottom of the layers palette that looks like a piece of paper. In the new layer, we are going to contract the selection by a few pixels. I used 6 pixels on an image that was about 150 pixels wide. You will have to adjust this value for your own piece. To contract the selection go to Select -> Modify -> Contract. Enter your value and then hit OK. Now we are going to feather the selection a little. Go Select -> Modify -> Feather. I used 4, but again you will have to adjust your value.

Once this is done, we are going to fill the selection on our new layer with white. Do this and the you should get this type of image below.

Now deselect the image by hitting Command (Control for PC) + D. We are now going to blur this layer a bit. Hit Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Hit the little Preview checkbox, and then move the slider to your satisfaction. It should not take too many pixels, I used about 3 or so.

So now we basically have the 3D torus. Think about the light on this torus coming directly from the top of the image. If you nudge the layer with the reflection (the top layer), you can make it appear slightly to the left or right. I like the straight-on look myself.

Now let's add some color. Duplicate the top layer by dragging the thumbnail over that little piece of paper at the bottom of the layers palette again. Change the blending mode to Color Dodge. Then go Image -> Adjust -> Hue and Saturation. Hit the Colorize checkbox. Adjust the Hue slider where you want it. Then increase the Saturation and lower the lightness value. Hit OK. Drop the opacity of the layer now to around 60% or so. Also drop the opacity of the original reflection layer.

Now I am going to play around with the bottom black layer. This is optional, but I like to play! I changed the bottom layer's color to blue with the Hue and Saturation adjustment. Then I duplicated that layer. The top one I changed to Color Dodge mode and adjusted the opacity down. Then I reduced the bottom layer as well. I added some scanlines behind (underneath), the bottom layer. Then I duplicated this layer, and deleted everything outside of the torus. I move this scanlines donut between the two bottom colored layers to make it appear as though they were transparent. I also added a blue drop shadow to the very bottom torus layer.

Here is my layers palette. I have name the layers with the Blending Mode and Opacity Value to help you sort them out.

And here is my final image. Play around with this and change the opacity and so forth of the different layers. You may come up with some really cool combinations. Hope you have fun. Talk at you in seven days.