Draw a CD in Photoshop

Creating a great looking CD in Photoshop is a relatively easy task and only takes a couple of minutes from start to finish. If you follow this Photoshop tutorial you’ll be able to create all sorts of CDs in no time. So then, lt’s begin.

Set the scene

To begin with we want a canvas with a white background, 600px by 600px. Now before we do anything we need to create two new guides. To create a new guide in Photoshop click on View and then New guide in the main menu.

Using this create two guides; one vertical guide at 300px and one horizontal guide at 300px. The point at which these guides cross on our canvas is the exact center point and considering we’re dealing with perfect circles in this drawing it’s a good idea to use these guides to make sure we keep everything accurate.

The main circle

With our guides in place and the center of our canvas clearly visible we can now start creating our CD. From the tools window (go to Window >> Tools if the tools window isn’t open) select the elliptical marquee tool.

Now, place your cursor over the point where the two guides cross in the center. On your keyboard hold down both the Shift and Alt keys and then click and drag to create a fairly large circle as shown below.

In case you don’t already know, holding down Shift whilst using the marquee tools keeps the shape proportional therefore resulting in a perfect circle. As for holding down Alt, this means the shape is created around your cursor with your cursor remaining as the center point.

Create a new layer (Ctrl+N or Layer>> New layer) called “outer”. Then, select the gradient tool and make sure that it is set as an angle gradient. You can do this at the top by selecting the angle gradient icon as shown here.

With that set, now select the preset rainbow gradient.

Now, click and drag from the center point to the outer line of the circle. You should now have something similar to this.

Smaller circle

The next step is to create another circle but this time smaller. Just like before use the elliptical marquee tool and draw a smaller circle. Create a new layer called “inner” and fill in the selection with white. Before deselecting the current selection click on the “outer” layer and press delete on your keyboard.

And again, we need to create a smaller circle. Use the elliptical tool to select a smaller circle in the center but this time do not create a new layer. Instead, press the delete key on your keyboard.

Since our background is also white it’s hard to show this step in an image since the smaller circle won’t be visible therefore in the following picture I have used black to illustrate the size of the smaller circle.