Glossy buttons are still all the rage. Actually, anything that has a gloss on it will look cool, especially if you add a little reflexion to it.
I’ve seen a fair share of tutorials on this and I still think I may have a bit to add, from my own experience. So, to add a little extra something, here’s a glossy button Photoshop tutorial that’s really easy to do, uses only one layer with effects and even nicer: it allows you to quickly change the color of the button.
Here we go. Start by creating an empyt RGB 72 dpi file, I chose a 400×400 px working area, filled with white:
Then, hit your rounded rectangle tool (U, or shift+U to cycle through the various shape tools), and give it a 20 px radius.
Time to draw your button shape. Pick a foreground colour and draw the button.
I used blue, #4F6F9E for the colour and 250×96 px for the button size. It’s quite a big button, but you can make smaller ones with the same effect.
OK, now the fun part. Double-click on the right-hand side of the name of your shape 1 layer to access your layer effects. (Sorry, the screenshot says “right-click”, its a mistake, I’ll fix it asap).
Go to “drop shadow” and configure it like the image below. We’ll use a 90 degree shadow. I hate seeing those glossy buttons with a top glow and an oblique shadow: makes no sense. Remember to try to make sense. Where’s your light source? Above? Good, then shadow goes in the bottom.
So far, it’ll look unimpressive:
So go to gradient overlay to really lay down some gloss on this baby.
You’re going to want to click on whatever gradient is there by default, to edit that and replace it with this:
Now, that’s a bit hard to make out, so here it goes: You need five markers on top (the alpha settings), and five on the bottom (the colour settings). By default, Photoshop will have a black to white gradient on there, so add three markers on top and three on the bottom.
Then, click on each marker and modify its values, thusly:
Alpha markers:
- opacity: 90%; location: 0%
- opacity: 40%; location: 46%
- opacity: 0%; location: 47%
- opacity: 95%; location: 86%
- opacity: 95%; location: 100%
Colour markers:
- colour: white; location: 0%
- colour: white; location: 46%
- colour: black; location: 47%
- colour: black; location: 86%
- colour: black; location: 100%
That’s it, you can hit ok and get ready to mess with the overlay settings, like so:
Notice the important bit: blend mode is set to overlay; this will allow you to change the colour of your button with lots of flexibility. Only a few colours won’t work at all. You can also design the whole gradient in reverse and not have to hit “reverse”, but I like it the hard way 🙂
Right! All that work payed off, because now you should have this:
That could be it, but a stroke adds a bit of solidity to it, so go into the layer fx, activate the stroke option and change it around like this:
Notice the red circle? That’s where you should pick the colour for your stroke from. More or less 1/4 of the way up the button you just created.
And that’s it. You can add some text to it. I’ve added the word “gloss”, using “Calibri”, changed the fill alpha to around 80%, added a 2px stroke the same colour as the button’s and a 1px distance 2px size inner shadow.
And what’s better… if you double click the colour swatch on your button shape, you can now happily change the button’s colour and alll you have to do is adjust the stroke’s colour in the end (that’s easy: just pick from 1/4 of the way up the button).
Here are a few examples. Have fun!
