Photoshop Tutorials

With this nice & easy Photoshop tutorial you can learn how to design some glossy, professional-style buttons. Professionals that make website templates for a living can use this sort of effect efficiently and make plenty of money!

1. Preparing the Canvas/Background

First of all create a new document of any size, or open up a website template document you might have laying around. I used small document size of around 400 x 340 because I’m not going to be making a complete template. I also added a light grey gradient into the background.

2. Create the Shape

Get the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make a Set-Sized Selection of 140 x 140 pixels somewhere on the canvas.

3. Filling the Shape

With the selection still active, make sure you’re on a new layer and fill it with a radial gradient, using colors of your choice.

I used the colors #3e94d4 and #336fc1, a nice light/moderate blue selection. I then also applied a White (#ffffff) 1px stroke to the main layer.

4. Adding Highlights

Start by selecting the main layer again (hold ctrl and click the layer thumbnail).

Contract your selection by about 4-5 pixels by going to Select > Modify > Contract and inputting your amount in pixels.

Now, find and get out the Gradient Tool, then drag a White to Transparent gradient from the top to the bottom like so:

You should be left with a result like this:

Now get out the Pen Tool and make an orb-shape path like the one shown below.

With the Pen Tool still selected, right click the path and click Make Selection, use the default options.

Create another new layer and again with the Gradient Tool make a White to Transparent gradient from the top to the bottom of your button, so you get something like this:

Change the layer mode for this layer to Soft Light then lower the opacity if needed, I didn’t think it needed it.

5. Finishing Touches/Details

For details I started by adding a low-opacity icon in the left corner of the button. (Please note: The icons that I used in this tutorial are from either TemplateMonster, or the Web Design Library)

Add in some text for your button, so that people know what the button is for. The font settings that I used were Tahoma, 11 pt, #ffffff, with this drop shadow layer style.

I then duplicated all of the layers, moved them over so there’s about 10 pixels space between each of them then changed the gradient colors.To change the colors, simply edit the gradient for the first layer, then edit the drop shadow color for the text layer.

Well, that’s just about it for this tutorial, folks! Thanks for reading & visiting PhotoshopStar, I hope you enjoyed this easy tutorial!

You can feel free to download the PSD file from this tutorial from here:

(110kb)