Cartoon Bubbles in Photoshop

Underwater scenes look so much cooler with bubbles. Being the ever-ready Photoshop pusher, I just had to figure out how to create really nice looking bubbles in Photoshop. What I've come up with is a simple 5-step process for creating really nice bubbles that can look more or less cartoon or illustration - ish depending on what kind of graphic you're using them in.

You won't need any special filters or plug-ins to perform this tutorial. Everything you need is built right into all versions of Photoshop from 7.0 through the current CS2. The specific steps here are done in Photoshop CS2, but will work in other versions as well.

Making Bubbles

One. Create a new canvas (File, New) that is in RGB mode with a white background. It needs to be sized around 400 x 400 pixels (or larger if you feel like it).

With your new canvas open, right-click and duplicate the background layer. This just makes life easy when doing our gradient - which we'll do right now. Set your foreground color to a bright, light blue and your background color to a darker shade of the same blue. Then, go to your layer styles (Layer, Styles) and click "Gradient Overlay".

The overlay you want to create has the light blue at the center and the dark blue at the edges. To do this, click the gradient drop-down and select your two-blue gradient. Then, set the style to "Radial". Finally, slide the "Scale" slider up to the right as far as it will go.

Two. Now to start our bubble. Set your foreground color to black and your background color to white. Then, grab your elliptical (circle) SHAPE tool - not the marquee tool, we want a shape. Now, hold the "Shift" key down on your keyboard while you draw the circle out. Holding the shift key down makes the circle stay perfect - not turn into a strange oval.

Right-click the layer made by your circle shape and click "Rasterize Layer". This makes all the lines smooth and crisp. Then, lower the "Fill" of the layer to 0%. It will make it look like your circle is gone - but don't worry, it's not.