Make a great ball effect 

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial you will see how to make a neat and cool ball in just a few steps.

First we will need to make a small pattern to make the "holes" in the ball, so start by making a document 20 by 20 pixels, in there grab the elliptical shape tool and draw a small ellipse as I did.

Now in the layers panel double click the layer to get to the layers styles panel and give it settings as shown below.

I made a green background for the hole because we will do a green background color for the ball.

Now we will define the pattern and save it, so go to edit -> define pattern and give it a name you can remember.

Now comes a couple of tricky steps, you might want to read them a couple of times.

Make a new document, and give the background layer a green color or gradient (same as the inner part of our small hole pattern). Then make a new empty layer for us to work in.

Now with the rectangle selection tool drag out a square on the stage as shown below.

Go to edit -> fill and locate the pattern we just made, and hit ok, now you should have an image like this.

While still holding the selection go to filters -> distort -> spherize and set it to 100 percent so you get a ball like this.

delete the outer part of the pattern so we only have the spherize part as shown below.

Now we will give it a bit of shadow on the ball, so make a new layer above it and, hold down ctrl and click the ball layer in the layers panel to load the selection, then select the new layer, and give it a gradient from a light gray to a darker gray and drag it as a ball like below.

then set the new balls blending modes to hard light, so we got a light source on the ball from the left upper corner.

Now you can make a drop shadow from a simple black ellipse shape that you can apply some blur filter to as I did.

And we are done!