Photobie Forum

odidio · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 89 Location: N.S. Canada

Here's a quick one for making a glassy 'pill' shaped button.

Open Photobie and create a new photo, 300x100 with a white background.

Set the foreground color to a dark shade of what you want to use and the background color to a lighter shade of the same color.

Go to the menu on the right, 'Fill shapes' and select the 'round rectangle'.

On the top menu put a check in 'gradient' and use the settings, size *50 - *vertical - *double.

(click thumbnails to enlarge)

Place your cursor on the white background and drag out the pill shape. Be careful not to drag too far as the gradient will start over. Drag it far enough though so you get a nice rounded shape.

Now keep the pill layer selected and got to the menu on the right and choose the 'round rectangle' selection tool. Drag out the selection over the top part of the pill shape, and about half way down. ( You may want to zoom in a bit to adjust your selection)
Now on the layer manager choose the clone tool and, 'clone only the selected area on current layer'.

With the cloned piece selected go to the adjust color balance tool on the layer manager and select the first option, 'adjust color balance'. Slide the 'brightness' button all the way to the right and click ok.

The cloned piece will be very bright so slide the 'opacity' bar down to blend it in to the original pill shape. You can also use the 'hand' tool to resize or adjust the clone.
Now place check marks beside the pill shaped layer and the cloned piece and then 'merge' - 'merge remove'. Your shape may seem to turn transparent ( due to the setting for the cloned piece), just slide the opacity bar back to the top.

Now to create the shadow, make sure your shape is selected in the layer manager and go to the clone tool and 'clone current whole layer'. Now in the layer manager select the first pill layer so the shadow will be behind. Go to the adjust color balance tool - 'adjust color balance' and slide the 'brightness' and 'contrast' buttons all the way to the left to get a very dark pill shape, then click ok.

Now on the layer manager click on the hand icon so you can move the layer and move the dark layer down and slightly to the right. Now lower the opacity of the shadow to make it look more realistic.

That's it, you can try different colors and shapes.
Remember, if you want larger or thicker buttons you will have to adjust the gradient size.

If you want you can delete the white back ground, and it would be best to save the shape in png format.

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Cheng · Site Admin Joined: 11 Aug 2005 Posts: 104

Great love this one,

In fact this is one the tutorial I am looking for a long time.

Nice job