The first photo would involve a transformation to change the shape of the mellon to a football shape. The second step would be to clone he cross stripes from the main stripes and add shadows for accents.
The second photo utilizes similar techniques to the tutorial. Looks like they had a single color (white) soccerball with a glossy finish. They used the multiply layer blend mode to pass the highlights and shadows to the mellon, after placing and sizing the soccer ball over the mellon. This type of photo would not require the last step in the tutorial and you would mask out between the stitch lines as they are keeping the highlights of the soccerball.
If you try to use a soccer ball with black spots, the effect would be compromised becuase the multiply layer blend mode would leave the spots visible. Or that may be the effect you want. It's all play anyhow.
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"Mounting a photograph is a misdemeanor in Arkansas."
Worked a long time on this one, but I can't seem to make it match, without spending hours tediously erasing around every individual lace with a tiny brush.
Check your layer blend mode setting and your layer stacking order.
I was able to do this in a few minutes and was not real careful with masking.
Good Luck.
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"Mounting a photograph is a misdemeanor in Arkansas."
I think what I need, is a tut on masking, cuz I can't quite seem to understand it. I can't grasp how it differs from reducing the opacity on a top layer, & erasing the unwanted bits.
The concept of somehow painting with black, to erase something, confuses me, too. Good tut, but I'm just struggling with this masking thing.
I did manage to finish the chop, & although it wasn't quite as much work as I expected, it still took over an hour of tedious erasing with a tiny brush.
Masking is the small part of the tutorial. The key to making this work and look realistic is the "Multiply" layer blend mode. Changing the baseball layer blend mode to multiply will make the white disappear and keep the shadows and string colors so that you do little to no masking. The colors that are left will pass some of the color of the fruit layer thru, making the shadows, stings and other items look like they are part of the fruit.
If you are not using Photoshop and are using another software package that does not support layer blend modes, this technique will require a lot of manual masking that the "Multiply" blend mode is eliminating.
Hope this helps.
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"Mounting a photograph is a misdemeanor in Arkansas."
Thanx, Tx. Actually, that's what I did, but for some reason, it carried a lot of the image of the ball through, too, along with the laces. It made the laces come through real nicely, but unfortunately, a good bit of the ball itself too, as you can see from the dark area around the laces in my first pic.
That's great! 
Bad Guys II
Linear Mode
