Family trips, holidays in distant lands, weekend trip to beaches? All good reasons to make our cameras go snapping’. And when we do get these pictures back on to our PC, here’s a unique way of making them into something totally cool!

You will now learn how to make a 3D ball out of photos of nature, family or pretty much anything that’s sitting lazy in a folder in your hard drive. The 3D ball can be placed on any background to create an amazing album cover. So here we go!

Editor’s Note: Please click on the screenshots to see them at 100% zoom

Step 1: Open Photoshop (preferably CS3 as it has the plugin required) and go to File – Automate – Contact Sheet II. Once in the dialog box, browse and choose the folder where all your photos are stored. For this tutorial, we are using 25 photos. Input width and height as 6 each. Uncheck Flatten All Layers and Use Auto-Spacing. You should now see a grey box to your right. Click ok.

Step 2: On clicking ok, a bunch of windows and layers would be popping up and resizing themselves, wait till they complete till you get an arrangement that looks something like this. Select the move tool and check Auto-Select Layer:

Step 3: Now we don’t want any white spaces in between the pictures. Using the most attractive photo as the center, place all the images around the centerpiece till you get something like the below picture. You can do this by using the move tool.

Step 4: We are not big fans of white spaces this tutorial. So to compensate for those created, using the move tool, we Alt + Click on some image and drag it into the white space. (Alt + Click duplicates the image). Do this on enough images to fill up the white spaces.

Step 5: Go to Layer – Flatten Images.

Step 6: Using the Circular Marquee tool, make a selection dragging the cursor from the top left corner to the bottom right while holding shift. Press Ctrl + J // Cmd + J to duplicate the selection into a new layer.

Step 7: Delete the background. Now Ctrl + Click on Layer 2 to get just the selection of the circular layer. Go to Filter – Distort – Spherize and use 100%.

Step 8: Again Ctrl + Click the layer and create a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N). Go to Edit – Stroke. Choose the color as black and thickness as 100. Select the Inside radio button and click ok.

Step 9: Go to Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur and use an amount between 80 and 83.

Step 10: To give a sort of a glossy feel to the whole sphere, use a brush with a comfortable radius and a very low percent of hardness (around 10-15%) and click once on the image as shown. Press Ctrl + Shift + E to merge visible layers.

Step 11: I created another image with a black to gray gradient as the background and pasted the sphere in that image.

Step 12: Duplicate the layer (Ctrl + J). Choose the original layer (Here, it’s Layer 1) and go to Edit – Transform – Flip Vertical.

Step 13: Drag the flipped layer lower such that only a bit of it intersects with the Layer 2.

Step 14: Finally, using the eraser tool and taking a brush with a large enough radius and low hardness (Around 10%), erase the parts of the flipped image to get something like this.

And there you go folks, a 3D Photo montage!