Snooker Ball in Photoshop

Today we made a Snooker ball in Photoshop we did this by first making a gradient on a layer above the background. This gradient went from foreground to background. This created a black fading to white background on which we could create our snooker ball. We then used a selection tool called elliptical marquee tool. This tool creates circles but only if you hold Shift. We then positioned the circle in the centre of the page we then used the selection we already had to create a copy of the circle slightly below the circle we had and then filled that one in black. To create a shadow from the black circle we used Gaussian Blur on a scale of 25 to give it a very Soft edge that looked like a shadow then positioned it in the right place. Then to make the shadow look natural we used dodge tool to create a highlight on the original circle and then used the burn tool on the bottom to make the bottom of the circle blend with the shadow we did. We then made a selection with the elliptical marquee again and created three ovals that where all connected and then saved the selection. Using the circle selection and loading the new selection into the current it meant we could create a layer mask and then with reduced opacity to fade the colour in circle again but leaving a faint white outline to make it look like a glare coming off the ball this we the final touches to our snooker ball.