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Glass bubbles effects with Paint Shop Pro 6 are easy to do. Here is a quick and easy method I came up with while playing with the adjustment layers. I start with the image show in Fig. 1 below. Now I select a circle, the size I want my bubble using the Selection tool set with anti alias check. I then save the selection to an alpha channel and then do Selections | Promote to layer. This gives me a second layer.
Fig. 1 Now if you had a bubble over and object it will distort the area that you see through the bubble. To get this effect go to Selections | Select None then go to Image | Deformations | Circle making sure you are on the layer you promoted. Once this is done reload your selection from the alpha channel. You should now have something similar to Fig. 2 below.
Fig. 2 Here is where the effects start to take shape, so set your foreground color to white and background to black. Now add an Adjustment Layer | Levels but make no adjustments to it yet, as we will come back to that a little later. Ok once this is done, we now flood fill with a sunburst gradient using the Foreground to Background gradient on the adjustment layer. I have it flood fill tool set as shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 After you do the flood fill you will see no change at all. You can check it by moving your mouse over the layer control palette as shown in Fig. 4 below.
Fig. 4 You now want to go to the Layer Control Palette and right click on the layer control for the Levels layer. Pick Properties from the menu and adjust it similar to what is show in Fig. 5. These adjustments can vary depending on the image so watch what the adjustments do to your selected area.
Fig. 5 Now we add a new raster layer above the Levels layer and I called this layer white cutout. Go to Image | Effects | Cutout and set it as similar as shown below in Fig. 6. Once this is done turn the layer's blend mode to soft light.
Fig. 6 We now add another new raster layer which I called black cutout above the white cutout layer. You will need to repeat the steps as we did with the white cutout except change the shadow color to black, horizontal and vertical offsets to -3. The last step is to add 1 more raster layer to the top, which I called drop shadow. I added Image | Effects | Drop Shadow set as show in Fig. 7 below. You also need to set the layer blend mode to soft light as well.
Fig. 7 We now have a pretty good looking glass bubble over our image shown below. You can add some brightness to it by duplicating the bubble layer and set the duplicated layers blend mode to Screen. Now turn down the opacity on this layer till you have the brightness you want. One other suggestion is to use the airbrush and spray a white spot where the light would hit the bubble (on a new layer) and adjust the opacity to what looks best to you.
Final Image This methods could also work for glass effects over images as well. As always I welcome all comments and suggestions in regards to these tutorials. PSP file used in this tutorial.
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