How to make soft circles

[Aviorrok]

Hi

How can I do a soft circles like in icon

 

[Paul]

Five layers, first full of a white background, then a new layer with a circle filled with a colour repeat with other layers making a new colour in each circle and dropping opacity by say 20%, and set each layer to multiply move to overlap each other and bobs the bloke with the biggest bike at the race track.

 

[dv8_fx]

........ and bobs the bloke with the biggest bike at the race track.

View attachment 52643

LiZad translates this as ....

VIOLA!!!!

 

[Aviorrok]

Thanks but is not like in my photo. Your circles is only with low opacity ,In my photo the circles is so soft and smooth

 

[Tom Mann]

Everyone has slightly different interpretations of words. When you say, "soft and smooth" are you referring to the edges of the circles in your example not having incredibly sharp boundaries, or are you referring to the colors in the areas of overlap being brighter and less saturated, ie, more pastel-like?

If it's the former meaning, feather the edges of your circles or the masks used to make them. Use a feather radius of 0.7 to 1.5 pixels.

If it's the latter meaning, instead of just using a "normal" layer blending mode, experiment with other layer blending modes till you see an effect you like, or you might even try something as simple as putting a "brightness/contrast" adjustment layer at the top of your layer stack and decreasing the contrast substantially.

Tom M

 

[IamSam]

The ellipses where made using about a 1px feather.

The softer pastel color pallet will also contribute to the overall softness of the finished look.

The layer order is important.
Here is the order.



As Paul pointed out, the next important matter is the blending mode for each layer as well as the opacity.
This is a matter of experimentation.

This is not exact since I did not know what the original starting colors were.

 

[lizzader]

Here's what it looks like to me:
There is a light (top) to dark (bottom) gradient on each circle, a very slight inner shadow, as well as a slight drop shadow on each circle as well.

Then follow IamSam's directions!

 

[lizzader]

Here's what I came up with:



I may have went a bit harsh on the inner shadows as well as the background gradient, but I hope this helps you out!

 

[Paul]

Thanks but is not like in my photo. Your circles is only with low opacity ,In my photo the circles is so soft and smooth

Use the blur luke use the blur:mrgreen:

 

[Tom Mann]

Accurately reproducing this effect was an interesting challenge.

The right hand image attached below is about as close as I could come to the original (on the LHS) without explicitly introducing shading inside each circle (as suggested by lizzader ).

I followed Sam's approach with respect to the order of layers and using the multiply layer blend mode (with each layer near full opacity), but differed in that I did the simulation in the Lab color space, and did some minor tweaking using Topaz Adjust as the last step before conversion back to sRGB for posting. Working in Lab produced a major improvement in simulation accuracy compared to working in sRGB. I have a sneaking suspicion that working in CMYK might even be better, but, to be honest, I don't feel like putting any more effort in this little exercise.

BTW, to avoid the difficulty of visually comparing images of two different sizes and/or with the circles located differently, I did all my work at 180px image size, and tried to place the circles very close to the originals. You'll notice that my attempt doesn't have any JPG compression artifacts, whereas the original does. In such a small image, these may actually visually seem to smear things out a bit and my help with the "smoothness" sought by the OP, but I didn't bother to add in any fake JPG artifacts to mine to test this.

Hopefully, the OP will return to discuss this more -- perhaps giving some context to this little exercise.

Cheers,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

PS - Oh, I forgot to mention that to ease visual comparison, I did introduce a slight gradient in the background (like the original has), but I made no attempt to be very accurate in doing this.

T

 

[Aviorrok]

Here's what I came up with:

View attachment 52669

I may have went a bit harsh on the inner shadows as well as the background gradient, but I hope this helps you out!

WOW can you post tutorial how you did it?

 

[IamSam]

WOW can you post tutorial how you did it?

Please see posts #7 and #8.