Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

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Ok let ‘s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stock:

Font

Step 1

Create a document sized 200px * 20opx with white background and 72 dpi (web graphic) – please note that this is the actual size of the button we will be making.

Here I will show you a little trick: hit Ctrl + R to make the rule visible on the top and left edge, click on the ruler and drag a guide to the edges of our canvas, as shown below:

Hit Ctrl + Alt + C and bring up the Resize Canvas window, then apply the following settings:

You will have the following effect (I set the background colour to grey for demonstration purpose):

You can see by doing so, we have the perfect guides setup for a 200px * 200px button, without the need to add and remove guides afterwards:

Step 2

Now let’s perpare a simple background to work on. I perferred  a nice light grey gradient fill. So grab a the Gradient Tool and fill the background layer as shown below:

Create a new layer called “backlight” and grab a big and a small soft round brush, do two single clicks to the position as shown below: (top and centre)

Resize and position this layer as shown below:

Now we have a nice background to work on our button :)

Step 3

Now grab the Rounded Rectangular Tool from the toolbox (press the U key) and apply a 10px feather to it, draw the following according to the guides:

Name this layer as “button bg”, and apply the following blending effect to this layer:

Drop shadow

Gradient Overlay

Stroke

Here is the effect so far:

Step 4

Now let’s add some highlights and shadows to the button background. Create a new layer under the button bg layer, use the rectangular marquee tool to create a shape like this:

Name this layer as “shadow” and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to it. Make sure you deselect the layer first:

Resize it from the top (Ctrl + T) and reduce the opacity to around 30%, you will have the following effect:

Create a new layer called “Highlight” on top of the button bg layer, set its blending mode to “Overlay”, grab a white soft brush, do a single click as shown below:

Duplicate this layer once and change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Normal”, resize it to a very thin level, position it just above the top edge of the button bg layer, as shown below:

You will have the following effect so far:

Step 5

Now let’s draw a simple envelope onto this button. Create a new layer on top of all previous layer, grab the Rectanglar tool and draw a rectangule as shown below:

Call this layer “envelope” and apply the following layer blending options to it:

Drop Shadow

Outer Glow

Stroke

and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now let’s add a few more stuff onto the envelope to make it look more realistic. Create a new layer called “envelope top” and grab the Polygon Tool from the toolbox:

Apply the following settings: (3 sides)

and draw a triangle as shown below, use the Free Transform tool to fit it onto the envelope:

apply the following layer blending option to it:

Drop shadow

Inner Shadow

Gradient overlay

Stroke

and you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this layer once and rename the new duplicated layer to “envelope bottom”, flip it vertically by Ctrl + T and right-click:

Retain all the layer blending option except the stroke option, position this layer as shown below:

Create a layer in between the top and bottom envelope layers, grab a soft round black brush and do a single click in the centre:

here is the effect so far:

Step 7

Now we’re almost done. Finally we can type some texts onto the button – “Contact Me” with font we downloaded, as shown below:

You can here I used a dark red color – the reason I did it is that I’d like to use a bit embossing/sink-in effect here. The trick is to use a slightly darker colour for the font than the background color, so that when we apply the blending effect later on, we will achieve better looking result.

So let’s add the following layer blending options to it:

Inner Shadow

Gradient overlay

Stroke

Also here is a trick – when adding stroke effect to the text, make sure to select a color slightly lighter then the background colour, for the embossing effect.

Here is the final effect I have: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hopefully you learnt something new and find it useful! Till next time, have a great day!

When you first started with Photoshop, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of features and functionalities built for various graphic design tasks and basically don’t know where to begin. So what can we do to overcome this initial difficulty? Just like learning every other thing in life, we start with the easiest part.

In this post, I will provide 5 Simple, Yet Useful Photoshop “How-to”s for Absolute Beginners. Take a look and hopefully you will see after all, Photoshop is not that hard to start with!

Before we start, please note that this tutorial is made in Windows with Adobe Photoshop CS3 and CS4, options may vary in version and OS platform.

How to Draw a Perfect Circle/Square

This might be the first question every beginner would ask. So let’s take a look at the toolbox and find the set of drawing tools as shown below: (to expand, left-click on the rectangular tool and hold)

and You can use those tools to draw rectangule or oval shapes, as shown below:

Now here is the trick: if you would like to draw a PERFECT circle or a square, you must hold down the Shift Key while dragging your mouse:

How to Adjust Brush Opacity and Flow

This is an interest topic – it may seem to be really simple, but the amount of emails and comments I received in regards to this question made me think to include it here.

The options are in fact quite easy to find – if you select the brush tool first, on the option bar above you will the opacity and flow adjustment right there, as shown below:

How to Load Custom Brushsets into Photoshop

These days there are many free Photoshop brushsets you can download from the net, but how to load those beautiful brushset into Photoshop? Here are the steps:

Click on the Brush Tool in the toolbox and click on the drop down arrow next to the brush shape symbol, as shown below”

Next, click on the right arrow on the right hand side of the brush pallette:

You will see a list of options appearing, select the “Load Brushes” option from the list:

and a window will pop up, choose the brushset from the folder and click on “load”:

and that’s it! You will see the newly loaded brushsets in the brush panel:

How to Draw Paths with Pen Tool

Pen Tool can be use to create paths – however, it’s not enabled by default. If you select Pen Tool and straight away to use it, you will see Shapes instead of Paths, as shown below:

So to change it to Path, follow the steps below:

Click onthe Pen Tool in the toolbox and you will a bunch of options appearing on the top bar, click on the second symbol as shown below to change it to Paths:

and that’s it, you can now draw pure paths on your canvas as shown below:

How to Quickly Create Guides in Photoshop

Personally I think this is a rather important and useful function in Photoshop. When you design interfaces (eg. website mockups), you will need to create a sets of guides to ensure precision. But exactly how do we do this?

Here are the steps:

Firstly, if you haven’t turn the Ruler option on, Press Ctrl + R to turn it on, you will see the rulers appearing on top and right of the canvas:

Now if you move your mouse over on the ruler, then left-click and drag, you will see the guides appears on the canvas, as shown below:

and if you would like to clear the guides, simply go to View > Clear Guides

One extra tip with guides: if you right-click on the ruler, you will see a list of options to change the measurements, as shown below:

That’s it for this post! Hope you find it helpful and if you have any further question, just drop me a comment below and I will try my best to assist.

Cheers and have a great day!

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool, Mystical Golden Sphere in Photoshop. The steps are in fact pretty simple and the outcome looks great in my opinion, have a try :)

We will be using some drawing techniques, plus customer brushsets and filter effects along the way, plus I will show you a clever use of Photoshop brush to create special effect around the sphere.

Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

PSD File Download

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Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Abstract Brushset 1

Abstract Brushset 2

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800 * 800px, fill the background with black colour. Create a new layer called “bottom light” and use a 250px soft round brush with white colour, do a single click in the centre of the canvas, then resize it  (Ctrl + T) to a very thin shape as shown below:

Grab the eclipse tool (U key) from the toolbox, create a new layer called “sphere” and draw a circle on top of the light, as shown below:

Apply the following layer blending options to this sphere layer:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Gradient Overlay

and you will have the following effect:

Step 2

Create a new layer on top of the “sphere” layer and use the eclipse tool to draw another oval shape to the top of the sphere. Name this layer as “highlight top” and change the blending mode to “overlay”, drop the opacity to around 40%.

You will have the following effect:

Duplicate this highlight layer once and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

change the blending mode of this duplicated layer to “soft light”, you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now let’s add some irregular lighting effect to the sphere. Create a new layer just above the sphere layer, use a soft white round brush to so a few single click around the sphere, set the blending mode to “soft light”.

Hint: make sure to paint some light on the bottom of the sphere, this will help adding more depth into the image.

The following effect is what I have so far: (the light strip on the right was done using the free tranform tool + a soft white round brush on a new layer with “normal” blending mode:)

Create a new “Shadow” layer on top of the “bottom light” (first layer) and use the same method as described in step 1 except using black colour instead of white, do a single click and resize it into the thin shape.

Change the blending mode of the shadow layer to “overlay”, you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Now we can add some effect around the sphere to make it look mysterious. Use the abstract brushset 1 we downloaded, choose any one of them and reduce its brush size to a smaller size, paint around the sphere as shown below:

Create another new layer and use the Abstract brushset 2 to paint some patterns on top of the sphere, as shown below:

(Hint: use the Free Tranform tool to distort, warp the new layer to create variations)

Here is what I have so far:

Add a new texture layer just above the background layer, and use the same brushset as we used just now, but this time with its orginal size, paint some patterns on the lower half of the canvas, as shown below:

Make sure you mix different brushset and set the opacity and flow to both around 50%.

Step 5

Now let’s add the golden colour on the sphere. The trick here to add a Color Balance adjustment layer just above the original “Sphere” layer, with the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

add the following Curves adjustment layer on top of all layers:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now we can do some final touches to the image. Firstly let’s flatten the image, duplicate the background layer once and apply the following Radial Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

Change the blending mode to “Screen” and you will have the following effect:

Now we don’t really want to the whole image to be blurred, so we can add a layer mask as shown below to hide some parts:

Also apply the following Smart Sharpen settings to the background layer:

and you will have the following final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Of course you can further enhance the effect and try out more colour schemes and filter effects, but that’s totally up to you.

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Until next time, have a great day!