Nav Bar Interface Tutorial
We've made some good progress so far, and now we just need to finish adding 6 more "pieces" to this and we'll be done.
The first piece we'll work on is the mid inset area. It's the one with a wire running through it.
- Make a new layer set and name it Mid Area Inset.
- Load the base shape's selection, and contract it by 9 pixels.
- From here, grab the elliptical marquee tool and subtract the selecton to make the left side of the selection below. For the right side, use the rectangular marquee tool and subtract a selection:
- Once you have it looking like that, create a new channel, and fill it with white. Deselect, and give it a gaussian blur of 2.5. Now open the levels dialog, and drag the sliders to sharpen the edges (Rounded Corners tutorial technique).
- Load the channel's selection, and go back to your layers palette. Create a new later in the Mid Area Inset layer set, and name it shape. Fill it with the gray color #a4a4a4.
You should have something like this:
- Apply the following layer styles (Layer -> Layer Style...) to this layer:
Bevel and Emboss
Satin
Stroke
You should have something like this:
- To make the wire that goes through this area, make an elliptical seelction similar to below:
Notice how it goes through the middle of that area. We're going to stroke this selection, and that will be the wire shape.
- Create a new layer called wire and choose a middle gray color as your foreground.
- Give this selection a stroke of 7 pixels, and be sure to choose center:
- To make the wire 3d, I loaded the selection of this layer, made channel, filled it with white, and deselected. Then gave the channel a gaussian blur of 1.5.Then, I used the lighting effects filter with this channel a couple times to get the desired 3d effect:
- Load the shape selection, contract it by 1 pixel (Select -> Modify -> Contract) and hit shift + ctrl + I to invert the selection. (The reason we contract by 1, is the stroke for the shape, is inside, and if we don't contract, the wire will overlap it by 1 pixel, and not look right. Try it without it if you want to see what I mean.)
- Make sure your current working layer is "wire", and hit delete. This will delete the part of the wire that is outside of the shape:
- Now give the wire a 1 pixel, black outside stroke (on its own layer) and lower the opacity to 70%.
- From here, you can add a subtle drop shadow to the wire, and also grab the brush tool, and add an inner shadow to both sides of the shape:
Right Shadow Area
- Make a new layer set and call it Right Shadow Area.
- This is just going to be a miscellaneous area where text could go, or some more decorations. It's really up to you if you want to extend it and add some things to it.
- Make a new layer called inner shadow, and make a black rounded rectangle (with a radius of 4 pixels) that is 133 x 29 pixels and place it like this:
- Select this rounded rectangle, and make a new channel called inner shadow rounded rectangle as we will need it in a few more steps.
- Make a new layer right below the inner shadow layer, and call it gradient.
- Load the inner shadow's selection, and give it a black to transparent gradient like this: (I hid the inner shadow rounded rectangle to give you a look at the gradient)
- No load the rounded rectangle's (inner shadow layer) selection, and contract it by 3 pixels. Hit delete, and deselect. You should have this: (gradient is hidden in this screenshot)
- Give it a gaussian blur of 2, and then erase the bottom with a soft brush at about30% opacity. Leave just a little bit at the bottom: (gradient layer is hidden here)
- Make a new layer, don't name it anything, and load the rounded rectangle inner shadow channel from a few steps earlier. Give it a white stroke of 1 pixel, inside:
- Load this layer's selection and make a new layer called subtle hlight.
- Give the selection a white to transparent gradient similar to this: (You may need to hide the selection, ctrl + h, to get a good view of the gradient you are applying)
- Drop the opacity to 40%. You are now done with this area.
Right Orbs
- Make a new layer set called Right Orbs.
- Make a new layer called orb base. Make two 17 x 17 gray circles, and place them like this: (Make one, duplicate it, position it, and merge it with the other one)
- Then, add some smaller circle to the side, on there own layer, and make a selection like this:
- Then, hit shift + alt, and click on the orb base layer. This will subtract the two black circles from the selection. Now, with orb base as your current working layer, fill the resulting selection with the same gray color as orb base. This is what you should have:
- Add the following layer styles to this layer.
Bevel and Emboss
Gradient Overlay
This is the result:
- Make a new layer called inner stroke, and you guessed it. Give the orb base layer a 1 pixel, black, inner stroke. Lower its opacity to 40%.
- Make a new layer named top orb, and with make a green (#2a8517), 12 x 12 circle, and place it in the top of the orb base shape:
- Now add the following layer styles to this top orb.
Inner Shadow
Bevel and Emboss
Stroke
- This is the result of those layer styles:
- To create the top highlight of this orb, make a new layer called top orb top hlight. Now load the top orb's selection, and contract it by 1 pixel.
- Now with the elliptical marquee tool, hold down alt while dragging a selection, release and it will subtract to make the top highlight shape:
- Fill the selection with a white to transparent gradient:
- Do the same thing with the top orb bot hlight:
- Highlight the top orb, top orb top hlight, and top orb bot hlight. Right click, and hit duplicate those layers. Then, position the resulting layers at the bottom, to make the bottom orb:
- Now you can add some text or decorations. I added a + and - sign. You can see the .psd for an example.
You can now head to the last page of the tutorial. We're almost done!