Photoshop/Illustrator Tutorial: Cool Golden Globe

A few people have asked me how I created the globe in the logo for Charles Rich Accounting. I decided to take a moment, and go ahead and write a tutorial of it. This tutorial utilizes Photoshop and Illustrator; I will try to explain each step as best as I can with the aim that even a person beginning with these two programs will understand it. I link to images (which will open in a new window) in order to save page load time. :)

Created with Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3, so I am not 100% sure how this will degrade for older versions.

1. Open Illustrator, and create a new document. Make a large circle using the Ellipses Tool while holding shift, and put a Radial Gradient in it. It should look like this (please note that size is not important at this point, but a medium-ish size is best).

2. Open Photoshop and take an image of the Earth as seen from space. This NASA image should work well. Remove the dark area; this can easily be done by applying a mask, selecting a small part of the dark part, and going to Select > Grow, then hitting delete (please note that black will need to be your secondary color, otherwise this will not work). It should look like this.

3. Now copy and paste your circle from Illustrator into Photoshop. Paste as a Smart Object, as it will be resized later on.

4. From the Layers panel, set the Smart Object's to color. The image will look like this now.

5. Now go to your Filters > Distort and spherize the Smart Object twice. To do this quickly, hit Cmd + F (or Ctrl + F for Windows users), like this.

6. Duplicate your Smart Object, and set it to Soft Light. It should look like this now.

7. Now reize the globe with Cmd + T (or Ctrl + T) and hold shift while shrinking it inward. It can now be cleaned up; this can be done easily by placing the layers in a group from the Layers panel and applying a Layer Mask in order to remove any strange boarders. Tip: if the golden part of the globe shrinks differently from the rest of the Earth, Rasterize the Smart Objects from the Layers Panel by right-clicking and selecting Rasterize. Please note, however, that if you were to now resize the image some of its quality will be lost.

8. Return to Illustrator, and draw two lines with the Pen Tool (P) and make them curve (Shift+C or Shift+A), like so. Make sure they are both different lines and not one large shape; it is easier if they are drawn separately and then dragged them so that their tails touched.

9. Now select both of the lines (Cmd/Ctrl + V). Go to Object > Blend > Make; a single line will appear between the two lines. Return to the same menu, but this time click on blend options, and choose the option Specify Steps, with 20-25 lines.

10. If you copy/paste your golden globe into Illustrator, you can then tweak the lines in order to make them fit around the globe, giving it a flying effect. Now, paste them into Photoshop. Apply a mask to these, and clean up the lines again. If you are unhappy with their coloring or shape, you can double-click on the smart object to import it back to Illustrator to put some final tweaks to them.

And now you have a flying golden globe! Here is the PSD if you would like to download it!