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Whew! The last four articles have been a bit
'information intensive'. Since Photoshop World is only a few
days off and I feel like having fun, I'm going to regress back
to my favorite topic...
DYNAMIC TYPE/INTERFACE EFFECTS! (And the
peasants rejoiced. Yay.)
To begin this week's exercise, I've used the
Rounded Rectangle Tool to create a simple rectangle with 'the
Create New Workpath button depressed (the second selection in
the options bar). Under the paths palette I converted my path to
a selection and filled it with 50% gray. Then with the Circular
Marquee I selected an area along the right edge of the image and
deleted the gray.
Pretty cool, huh? Ok, maybe not so much. Better
do some more tweaking!
Let's duplicate this layer, and reselect. You
can do this by Command/Control Clicking the layer name in the
layers palette. On the new layer, contract the selection. At 72
DPI I contracted 8px, but at a higher resolution (I normally
design at 200 dpi) you may want to increase the contraction. Now
Select inverse, delete, and select inverse again.
Let's play with the Layer Styles a bit. When you
installed Photoshop 6, many Layer Style sets were installed with
the program. We want to load the Glass Buttons Set. In the
Styles Palette select the Load Styles from the menu. You will
find the Glass Buttons Styleset in the Photoshop
6>Presets>Styles directory.
Once the Styleset is loaded, make sure the top
layer is selected and click on the Orange Glass Style to apply
it to this layer.
I want to dress this up a bit by giving the
'button' a little edge so I'm double clicking the 'effects' for
this layer and opening the Layer Style options, and applying a
black to white gradient stroke to the outside edge of the
button.
Eventually I would like to place some text in
this button, so in the Layer Styles I'm decreasing the size of
the bevel to flatten the center out a bit.
Ok, I think I'm don messing with the foreground
for a bit. Let's go back to the previous layer.
Command/Control>Click Layer 1 in the layers palette to select
it. Make sure layer 1 is highlighted in the palette, as we don't
want to disturb our settings for the button layer!
Again, we need to load a Layer Style Set.
Following the same procedure for doing so listed above, load the
Text Effects Styleset into the palette. The style we are looking
for is called, simply enough, 'Wood'. Apply that style to this
layer.
A little drop shadow goes a long way, so open
the styles for this layer and select the default drop shadow.
Just place a check next to 'Drop Shadow' in the blending options
menu when you open the styles window.
Now in a new layer I can enter my type and make
transitions for rollovers simply by changing the layer style
applied to the type!
OR...
You could apply the style change to the button
itself, leaving the type alone:
This same method can of course be applied to
type. For example:
When you create your menus in this manner, they
are extremely versatile and stackable for use in expanding
menus. Take a peek:
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