Reflective ButtonsTut, Easy to Follow

Well in this tut you will learn how to make an effective yet simple button in some easy steps.This can be handy for:

- Buttons for a template
- Buttons for a forum
- Can be used to make a reflective orb

(I may also write a flash tut on how to animate a button later on )

Well open Photoshop or what ever youre using to make it with. It doesnt matter what size because you can also shrink it later...

1 Select the rounded rectangle tool, may also be shown by the line tool, square or circle tool or the shape tool. See the screen shot underneath if your not sure...

You can fiddle with the radius setting (see screenshot) to change how 'round' your button will be, in this tut i use 20pixels

Choose the colour you would like your button to be( or you can do this later on)

2 Make a rounded rectangle shape the size you would like your button to be and it should automatically fill it in for you and if not then fill it in with a colour of your choice. note: In this tut i used the colour 910000

3 Right click the shape layer and rasterize it, this isn't needed but just helps it to see what effects we use later on.

You should now have something similar to below:

Click to enlarge

4 Now we apply some settings to get it to look more like a button... It is better to just 'play around' with the settings to develop your own style but ill post mine here if somebody else wish's to use them, its up to you.

Inner Shadow:

Click to enlarge

Bevel And Emboss:

Click to enlarge

Gradient:

Click to enlarge

In this tut i also put a 1pixel black stroke on it but that really depends on you

You should have something similar if you used the same settings as me:

5 Now we will add a small detail that adds that extra reflection but please note this is optional...

Make a new layer MAKE SURE YOU HAVE WHITE AS YOUR FOREGROUND FOR THIS!!! and then Grab the rounded rectangle shape again and make a small shape similar to the one we made for the button, see below:

Make sure that shape is filled with with white...

6 Rasterize the layer with the shape on, go to filter>blur>gaussian blur and set it to 4.

Play around with the opacity to get a good effet, i normally use 25% but it depends what tickles your fancy

optional: while holding CTRL press the little picture of the button layer in the layer pallete and it should show a selection, hit CTRL + SHIFT + I and it will invert it, then hit del. That just saves some pain if you develop it into something for web design...

You should know have something along the lines of this:

Now this is where youre skills come in, you can just add text and use it as a button, turn it into a rollover, use it as a small ad, whatever.