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I'm going to make this egg from a photo of yellow roses. I want to center my flowers on the egg, so I'll start with the image and draw the oval on it. This image is 269 x 312 pixels. It will make a very large egg, but the egg will look nicer if you start big and then scale it down when it's finished.
(NOTE: A gradient fill, a texture or a pattern would work just as well as the roses. I could also have made an oval with the selection tool on a blank image and added my pattern with the flood fill tool.)
Choose the selection tool, Sellection Type = Ellipse, Feather = 0, Antialias not checked. Draw an egg shape on your image. I drew an oval that covered most of the image vertically. (TIP: Once you have an oval shape you like, save it to the alpha channel [Selection/Save to Alpha Channel], so that you won't have to draw it again.)
With the oval selection active, select Filters/Eye Candy/Water Drops. For this egg, I used the following settings:
Number of drops: 1
Edge Darkness: 80
Opacity %: 50
Refraction: 18
Color: White
Random Seed: 1
Highlight Brightness: 22
Highlight Sharpness: 50
Lighting Direction: 304
Lighting Inclination: 47
These settings gave me the following image:
See how the selection is outside the raised part of the egg? So choose Selections/Modify/Contract/4 pixels. This contracts the selection so that it only encloses the part of
the image that Eye Candy changed. (NOTE: The number of pixels you need to contract may vary, depending on the size of your original image.)
With the oval selection still active, copy the image, Edit/copy (or use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+C). Then paste to a new image, Edit/Paste as new image, (or use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+V). This will create an image just the size of your egg with a transparent background.
Now, I thought that a bit of a highlight was needed make the egg look more "3D", so with the selection too set to ellipse, I made a small ellipse on the top left side of the egg and flood filled it with white.
With the white ellipse still selected, choose Selections/Promote to layer, (Keyboard shortcut: Shift+Ctrl+P).
Then deselect the ellipse, and make sure the white ellipse, not the egg, is your active layer. Next we're going to rotate and then blur the white ellipse. Choose Image/Rotate and select Right, Free = 25, and make sure "All Layers" is unchecked. If 25 doesn't suit you, undo the change and try another setting.
To soften the highlight, choose Image/Blur/Gaussian Blur. I used a blur of 4.00.
If you're satisifed with the egg, choose Layers/Merge/Merge Visible. This will retain the transparent background while collapsing all layers to a single merged layer. Now you're all ready to export the image as a picture tube, and when used at 50%, I think it looks even better.
Here are a couple of alternate Eye Candy Settings that I've used on some of my eggs.
Number of drops: 1
Edge Darkness: 84
Opacity %: 100
Refraction: 54
Color: R252,B222,G241
Random Seed: 69
Highlight Brightness: 100
Highlight Sharpness: 94
Lighting Direction: 132
Lighting Inclination: 45
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Number of drops: 1
Edge Darkness: 84
Opacity %: 100
Refraction: 54
Color: White
Random Seed: 69
Highlight Brightness: 69
Highlight Sharpness: 35
Lighting Direction: 316
Lighting Inclination: 53
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Big Ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill.
Don't forget that, all of you who don't have them.
--- John Elliot, Jr.
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