I've got an idea for doing a dark wizard type photo manip for which I will need an energy globe that's floating in the air. This is as far as I've got so far, but I'm not sure how convincing it looks. The globe is pretty much transparent so will take on any of the background colours, so the dark wooded area that I intend to use for the wizard image should darken down the interior of the globe.
All thoughts and comments are most welcome.

I've looked at it a few times now to see what it is that's bothering me. The grey energy part, the sphere looks too flat. It doesn't look like a ball it looks like a raised button. So that makes the purple around it look like a disc. I don't even know how you might fix that. Maybe glossy reflections or go much more diffuse like smoke maybe.

Hmm, I wanted to reply yesterday but couldn't think of how to approach it. If you added a square grey layer and ran filters-map-map object, selecting sphere and transparent background it would produce a ball for you that you could play with. I think the blue is a little too saturated for the very grey background as well.

I quite liked the image it just seems wrong with the background. One way you could make it more ball shaped is to make the yellow more spherical, I'm thinking this tutorial might be a good basis for that.

I know what you mean, it doesn't look right at the moment. More like a button than a ball as you say. It's a starting point but does need much more work.



Thanks for the tip, I forgot about the map object filter. There's so much new stuff in Gimp theses days it's hard to remember it all sometimes.
The blue is easy to fix as the ball is transparent. I just did alpha to selection of the ball and then changed the colour of that selection on the background layer using curves.



Thanks for the link, I'll have a look at that.
The background is just for testing, trying to get the ball to look right against a random background. The image I intend to use it in will be of a wooded area.

I have see a few energy balls that look good, but they mostly appear to be have made using photoshop. And for the very best ones there are no tutorials that I can convert for Gimp.