Mastering Layers in PhotoShop
We are going to be making some buttons today and to do that, we are going to be working with layers.
Open up a new document and make the size 300 pixels by 60 pixels and its background transparent.
To start with, lets fill the edges of the button with a nice blue colour. Change the foreground colour by clicking on the coloured box on the toolbox and typing 51, 102, 204 into the R, G, B boxes respectively of the colour picker.
Now, select the gradient tool (press and hold the Paint Bucket tool down) and change the gradient type to "Foreground to transparent" and the gradient pattern to the "Reflected Gradient, as I have done in the screenshot below.
Now working carefully, make a series of four gradients around the edges of the image you are creating, one gradient for each edge. If you have left your Photoshop preferences to their default settings, you should have what looks like a checkerboard as the background of your new image. If you press your mouse button at the absolute edge of the image, drag a little way and hold your shift button down, you will get a perfectly straight line for your gradient path. Make the gradient path about two of those checkers in length.
Once you have done that to all four sides of the new button, you should have something like this:
What we need to do now is create another layer. Think of layers in Photoshop as being exactly the same as the clear plastic you use in overhead projectors. You can fill it up with colour, you can use just a small part of it, you can do exactly what you can do with a standard image. The difference is, you can apply all sorts of layer effects and you can be a lot more selective about what you change within your final image.
If your layers pallette isn't showing, go to the "Window" menu and click on the word "Layers". That should bring it up. At the top-right of the Layers pallette is a small black triangle. If you click that, you will get a menu which has various options on it. From this menu, choose "New Layer..." from that menu and you will be presented with a new layer dialogue. For the moment, accept the default options and you will see another layer has been created called "Layer 2".
On the layers menu, you can see various icons and buttons, all waiting to be pressed. The ones you will find yourself using the most however, are the two directly next to the layer names. One looks like a small eye and the other will have (at various times) either a paint brush or what looks to be two chain links in it. The eye is a toggle for the visibility of the layer. If you can't see the eye, you can't see the layer. If you click the eye, it disappears from view and if you click there again, it will reappear. The paint brush denotes the active layer or the layer you are working on as does the blue highlighting of the layer itself. The chain links denote linked layers and are a little more complicated and outside the scope of this particular tutorial.
Now, click once on layer two in the Layers pallette and make sure it has been selected. Draw a rectanglular marquee around the inside of the blue colouring you can see, as in the image below.
Without deselecting that rectangle, go to the "Select" menu, choose "Modify" and choose "Border...". You will be presented with a small dialogue box. Type "14" into the border pixel size and press ok. Your selection should now have two edges and look a bit like a picture frame. We need to go to "Select/Feather" and make the feather radius 5 pixels now.
Make sure the foreground colour is set to RGB values of 51, 102 and 204 and choose the Paint Bucket tool (under the gradient tool). Click once inside the selection you just made and it should fill up with the blue colour you selected. It should also be nicely feathered.
Go to the "Select" menu and choose "Deselect". In the Layers pallette, double click with your mouse button just to the right of the words "Layer 2". You will be presented with a Layer Style dialogue.
Click on the words "Bevel and Emboss" in this dialogue and you should get a dialogue like the one below.
In the "Structure" section of the dialogue, change the "Style" to "Outer Bevel", the "Technique" to "Chisel Soft" and the "Size" to 8px and the "Soften" to 6px. In the "Shading" section, change the "Altitude" to 20 degrees and ensure the "Use Global Light" is checked. In addition, make sure the "Highlight Mode" is set to "Color Burn" and the "Shadow Mode" is set to "Multiply". Leave everything else at its default for now. Your image should now look like the one below.
Create another layer.
In this one, we are going to give the still transparent section of the button a bit of body. We want to change the colour of the foreground to a nice light blue colour. I chose R174, G198, B232.
Select the Gradient Tool and change background colour in the colour box to pure white. Change the Gradient Type to "Foreground to Background" and the Gradient Style to "Linear Gradient".
In Layer 3, draw a gradient using your shift key to keep the gradient straight, from the top of the image to the bottom. This will fill up your button with a gradient, but don't worry, I'm going to show you the beauty of layers here. You can arrange them. Its the same as dragging and dropping in Windows Explorer. Click and hold on Layer 3 in the Layers pallette and drag it down. You will see a black line when you reach a place you can release it to.
Now, you have most of your button completed, but we are going to do a couple more small things here.
Change the foreground colour to a nice deep blue colour. I chose RGB 23, 35, 108. Now, click on Layer 2 in your Layers Pallette and select the "Type" tool. Thats the one which looks like a capital T in your toolbox. Open up the "Character" pallette by going to the "Window" menu and choosing "Character". Choose a font you like and change the font size to a suitable size for that font.
Click somewhere in the image and type the word "Home". Using the "Move" tool, place the text where you want it to be in the button and make sure the text is the right size. Remember we will be changing the size of this button, so make sure its going to be readable.
Now, if you have followed this tutorial, your layer structure and potential button should look a lot like the screengrab below.
As you can see though, I have a few small problems I need to fix. On most of the corners, there are small patches of light blue showing through the top layer. I'm going to fix that now.
Remember creating layer one? Well, if we move Layer 1 back to just underneath layer 2, the light blue patches in the corner will disappear and you will have a lovely looking button just sitting there waiting to be used, after just one more task.
Before we get onto that though, you probably wouldn't want to have to perform all those steps for every single button on your website. If all the main buttons on the navigation bar are going to look similar to the ones you create with this technique, you can change the text of the button very simply. If you do it right, you will end up with a lot more layers, but everything will look consistant.
Click on the bottom layer and select the Type tool. Click on the little eye on the Layers Pallette which is next to the type layer you have already created and it should disappear from view. Click somewhere on the image (making sure you have the same font and type size as the previous type layer) and type your text. When you have finished typing, use the Move tool to get the type into position. Repeat the process for as many buttons as you need.
Before we go onto the next step, its a good idea to make sure you have saved at this point. If you use this technique for making the buttons on your website and your website grows (as they are wont to do) then it can be a bit of a pain to get the new text and so on exactly the same after the resize has taken place.
When we first created the image, we gave it a size specification of 300 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Thats obviously a bit big to be a standard button, so lets go over to the "Image" menu, choose "Image Size..." and change the width of the image to 100 pixels wide. if you make sure "Constrain Proportions" is checked before you do this, you will find the height changes to 20 pixels at the same time - which gives us a much more useable button.
I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful. During each tutorial I write, I try to explain and show examples of several different things which Photoshop is capable of. Play with settings, change things around, but above all - have fun.
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