Making smooth shapes for a futuristic
interface can be difficult, but not if you
know how to cheat! This tutorial will teach
you how to make a smooth shape from an
angular outline.
Open photoshop, make a new blank
layer, and switch to the channels palette.
(WINDOW > CHANNELS if you can’t find it).
Now create a new channel (It will be named
Alpha 1 by default).
Make sure your foreground color is white,
and select the polygonal lasso tool. (It’s behind
the regular lasso tool).
Make an angular selection like this one, then
fill it with white. (ALT + DEL to fill).
Now you have a pretty chunky object, so lets
make it smooth. Deselect (CTRL + D) and
Gaussian Blur (FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN
BLUR) your object. Blur it about 10 px.
Now it’s smooth, but the edges are all blurry,
and we don’t really want that, so let’s fix it in
the next step, this sentence has too many commas.
Let’s adjust the levels (IMAGE >
ADJUSTMENTS > LEVELS) so that your graph
looks something like this. Move the two
outside arrows in towards the middle. Click
“OK” and like magic, your object is now
smooth and the edges are defined.
Now with your “Alpha 1” channel
highlighted, click the dotted circle at the
bottom of the palette. This will turn your
alpha channel into a selection on your layer.
Click back over to the layers palette,
and click on the “Layer 1” you created at
the beginning of this tutorial. see your
selection?
Now we can fill it with a nice gradient.
Use
these colors and the linear gradient tool.
Drag down from the top of the selection to
the bottom.
Deselect (CTRL + D).
Double click the layer and add a drop
shadow distance=0 size=3 opacity=50, then
add an inner shadow with a distance=0
size=15 opacity=15.
This just adds a little variation in the shading
so that the object doesn’t look so flat.
Experiment with this technique and
see what you can come up with.
