beveling vol. 01


there are certain effects which got pretty overdone. one of them is eyecandy's inner bevel effect. the following method is a bevel which does not need any additional plugins and is far more flexible than ec's inner bevel.

another advantage of this method is, that you should understand how the eye interprets 3d effects - its nothing that a pretty cheap trick - make a highlight at the top left, and a shadow on the right bottom, and there is your 3d thinggie. if you understand this behaviour you should have no problems to develop nice 3d effects on your own.

i made a new file with a texture - does not really matter what, i made one similar to the metal of the rust tutorial.
i copied a radial selection (strg+c) in a new layer (strg+v) and altered the saturation and lightness of this part (strg+u).
next, take the selection of the circle (shift+click on the layer), feather it some pixels (i used 5), invert the selection and fill it on a new layer with black. now move the layer some pixels to the left and some to the top (a good idea is to move the layer as much pixels as you feathered it before). you can use the cursors for proper placement - every press is one pixel.
ok, if you got that far, you should slowly understand what this thing should be. take the selection of the shape again, invert the selection again and delete the selection on the shadowlayer.

now the same for the highlights: take the selection of the circle again, invert it, feather it, make a new layer, fill it with white, move it some pixels to the right and some to the bottom. take the selection of the shape again, invert it and delete the selection on the highlight layer.

the advantage of this method is pretty easy explained: due to the fact, that you have the highlight and the shadow on different layers, you are able to control how intensive they should work. just control the effect with the opacity of the various layers.

for the last step - the effect that the button look like embedded - i took the selection of the shape again, feathered it a few pixels (approx. 3 on this example), created a layer under the shapelayer, filled it with white and moved it a few pixels to the right bottom. then duplicate the layer, invert it and move it further to the top left. here i weakened the highlights by reducing the opacity of the highlight layers.
((back))