Tutorial: The Exploding Puzzle Globe Part I

Welcome to the great Exploding Puzzle Globe 3 part tutorial series. This is where we’ll take an ordinary planet, apply a jigsaw, add an energy explosion and get a cool effect:

You’ll see that this cool effect can be produced fairly easily with the creative application of several commonly over-looked features in Photoshop. What appears to be a time consuming, intensive drawing task can be greatly streamlined. And hey, you can use the saved hours to come up with silly pun filled adjectives to describe it: “Earth Shattering” or “Ground Breaking” or “World Rocking” just to name a few.

Here's the final effect we'll be working towards:

Part I: Carving A Planet.

In portion primo of this particular planetary puzzle picture problem we will cut up the globe into puzzle pieces. And since Photoshop doesn’t have a Jigsaw tool, we will use a puzzle pattern and some vectors to get the job done.

Step One:

Get the source globe image. I shot this one myself. No, really this globe picture is courtesy of NASA’s “Visible Earth” project http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/ the site has several copyright free, high resolution imagery of our wonderful planet. Let’s use the “Blue Marble” TIFF file at a resolution of 2048 x 2048

Step Two:

Create the puzzle pattern. (Or use this one here with this tutorial) Be sure to use four high contrast colors and the shapes should be interlocking. To make certain the pattern tiles correctly use the offset filter (Filter>Other>Offset) with the Wrap Around option selected.

This will offset and “wrap” the image so you can see where the seams are in the tiles and can adjust your image accordingly.

Step Three:

Then Select All (Ctrl/Cmd+A) and define the pattern.(Edit>Define Pattern…) and call the Pattern PuzzleColorTile

Step Four:

Open your globe image and use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to draw a circle selection around the globe. (TIP: Holding down the Shift key keeps the selection a perfect circle and holding down the Space Bar allows you to reposition the selection without letting go of your mouse button)

With the outline of the globe selected copy that to a new layer (Layer>New>Layer via Copy) and rename it “PuzzleFront.” Then turn off the visibility of the background layer.

Step Five:

Create a New Layer (Layer>New) called “PuzzleShape”

Ctrl/Cmd+click the thumbnail of PuzzleFront layer to create a selection in the circle shape of the contents. Fill the layer (Edit>Fill) with the pattern “PuzzleColorTile” you created in Step One

Press Ctrl/Cmd+D to deselect everything.

You should now have a circle the same size as the globe filled with a multicolor interlocking puzzle pattern. But that’s just how it looks, a flat circle filled with puzzle shapes. We need it to look like it’s in the shape of a sphere.

Step Six:

With the PuzzleShape layer selected, go to the Filter menu and choose Distort>Spherize. Set the amount to 100% and the Mode to Normal. which is code for Horizontal + Vertical apparently.

Step Seven:

This makes the puzzle pieces appear to form the shape of a sphere. But it also enlarged the shape, so scale the layer down (Edit>Transform>Scale) to match the same size as the globe.

At this point we could continue in several different ways. We have the puzzle shapes in the form of a sphere, so we could just use the magic wand tool to make selections of different shapes to remove. But that won’t really give us the fine amount of control and nice crisp edges we’d really like to see. The better way to go would be to use a vector mask for each shape so each piece of the puzzle could be individually selected. But wouldn’t that entail endless hours tracing shapes with the Pen tool? Well if you really want to, I won’t stop you. But I’d prefer to have Photoshop do the work for us!

Step Eight:

With the PuzzleShape layer selected go to Select>Color Range… Set the Fuzziness to 100. Notice the pointer turned into the eyedropper cursor. Use it to pick a color from the canvas (in this case, I selected red first) and hit OK

Step Nine:

Notice now the selection “marching ants” includes all the red puzzle pieces, but the selection isn’t tight to the very edges of the pieces. This would leave gaps between the puzzle pieces that we don’t want. We correct this by expanding the selection by a single pixel:

Select>Modify>Expand make sure the pixels is set to 1.

Now we’ll use that selection to create our paths for a vector mask.

Step Ten:

Change to the Paths palette and in the Path palette menu (that’s the little black triangle on the far right) select Make Work Path…

Set the Tolerance to around 0.8 pixels and hit OK

Now what we have is vector shapes defining the red puzzle pieces. But we don’t want just the red, we want all of them. To do this we will copy and paste all the paths into a new path that will be a collection of all the pieces.

Step Eleven:

Create a new Path with the New Path icon in the bottom right of the palette tray and name this new path “PuzzlePaths”

Select the Work Path by clicking on the thumbnail in the Paths palette and Copy (Ctrl/Cmd+C) then select the PuzzlePaths and Paste (Ctrl/Cmd+V)

Now we have the red pieces copied into our PuzzlePath, we just need to collect the rest of them too.

Step Twelve:

For the blue, yellow, and green pieces repeat the same process:

1. Select>Color Range… pick the color
2. Select>Modify>Expand expand by one pixel
3. Make Work Path tolerance of 0.8 pixels
4. Copy from Work Path
5. Paste into PuzzlePaths

When you are finished, the PuzzlePaths should include all the pieces on the globe.

Step Thirteen:

Make sure the PuzzlePaths path is selected and go back to the Layers palette.

Turn off the visibility of the PuzzleShape layer.

Select the PuzzleFront layer and create a vector mask from the combined path you just created: Layer>Vector Mask>Current Path

Not much difference is there? We can start to see the cut out of the pieces, but it’s rather flat so let’s add a little depth.

Step Fourteen:

We’ll use the old B&E. (Breaking & Entering? Bilingual Elephants? Bloated Ewoks? Noooo! Bevel and Emboss)

Use the Layer Style icon at the bottom of the palette to add a Bevel and Emboss style to the PuzzleFront layer. Adjust the settings to taste, but here I just used the default values.

And there’s our puzzle globe. No assembly required!

Tune in next time to Part II: Shaking Things Up where it all starts to come apart at the seams!