scriptygoddess

I’ve been hunting around the last few days, looking for a good tutorial on how to make those glossy/glass-like buttons in photoshop. There are A LOT of tutorials out there. Some of them are just hard to follow. Others only seem to work best with one particular shape. But I did find this one that worked for me no matter what shape I’m using. As well, it’s incredibly simple and easy to follow. The one thing I added which I think helps the effect came from another tutorial I had seen - which was to add a drop shadow - about 75% opacity, 0 distance, and size: 7px.

(The tutorial is somewhat old (in internet years) - dated 2001 in the footer… Makes me wonder if the site is and will be still visible for too much longer…)

There was another one I found that was a little “fancier”. (Side note: I went through so many of these pages today, and now I can’t find the link to the one I’m thinking of. If someone recognizes these steps please make a note in the comments, and I’ll update the post with the appropriate credit link. I’ve even gone through every page in my history. I suspect that I’ve combined a number of tricks from a variety of different tutorials to come up with this one, but with all the sites I saw, I can’t be 100% sure.) I liked this trick - but it didn’t work as well with every shape I tried with it. So click the “read more” to see how to create buttons that look like this:

(Updated 6/2/07 A lot of this is similar to these two tutorials on Bartelme - which I actually DON’T remember seeing before writing this - but I was looking at his badges trying to figure out how he did them, when I wrote this. I hadn’t seen that he had a tutorial on them.)
(more…)

Found a very cool tutorial to make swirling text in photoshop. There’s more tutorials on that site too, like this one for smoke.

(found via Creativebits)

This is a technique I use a lot at work. Mostly for times I have to show a screenshot - Just to make it look a little more interesting rather than just pasting it squared up and flat against the background.

Part of this tutorial is similar to one I found here: designsbymark.com (the Software Box with reflection) however, I also add a shadow which helps give more “realism”.

(click thumbnails in tutorial to see a bigger image)
(more…)