Ok. While I have the attention of both The V-Man and the Brain:

I sent this skin to someone to test. I know she always has a lot of content on her start panel and I wanted to see how the gradient looked streached.

It seemed very stripey

I have tried any number of streaching/tiling margin combos whithout success.

Have I drawn the image too small so that it streaches badly when applied (238x317) or is there some magic setting combo that I haven't tried?

20f3 the skin is lookin wonderful...ill wear it

Slight gradients over black typically cause issues with banding Tim, really the best way to combat it is draw it a bit bigger and\or put your sizing margins very close to one another.

Another trick is to add a sprinkle of photoshop noise (Gaussian and monochromatic)... just very slight.. it can mask the banding a bit for you.

Also.. rasterizing your panels first and drawing the gradients with the gradient tool as opposed to a layer style gradient can produce results with less banding sometimes.

Hope this helped.

Exactly.I just did that before reading this, John! Drawing the gradient on the shape and then adding the other effects gave it a smooth look with no stripes.

I'll re slice and whack it in

Thanks!

Hope ur not doing that in public

Working on a wallpaper

I'm unsure about the gleam on the globe. It seems wrong somehow Is it the shape, the gradient, the color?

I'm not afraid to show my ignorance publicly, so advice and pointers would be appreciated

How does it look w/o?

Perhaps decreasing the minor axis (up-down) and extending it to the border of the yellow and dark gray?

Also...a very small shift to the right.

I'd suggest googling some orbish, glass images.. look at some natural lighting.. right now its pretty standard as far as reflections go, definately fade the reflection at some point.

If you have CS4 use the 3D menu sphere primitive to get 3 point lighting.

GREAT!

Now I can't get that song out of my mind

Love the Colors

This is looking freakin sweet.  This is a must have.  Love the orbs and the colors.