Creating Badges: Part 2
Due to popular demand I’ve decided to write some kind of follow up tutorial to the “Creating Badges” tutorial. In the second part you will learn how to turn your basic shape into a glossy, three dimensional badge.
This tutorial starts from the assumption that you know how to create a badge like shape in Photoshop — this is discussed in the first part. So after creating the basic shape open the “layer style” window of the respective layer and assign a decent drop shadow as well as a linear gradient. You may choose similar values as shown in the screenshot below.
Now your basic shape should already look more badge like — but there are still some more steps to be performed. First of all we will create the subtle reflexion: Load the shape’s selection by “Cmd” respectively “Ctrl” clicking the respective layer in the layer palette. Afterwards contract the selection by one pixel — this can be achieved via “Select — Modify — Contract”. Create a new layer and fill the selection (6).
In a next step set the layer’s blending mode to “Overlay” and reduce its opacity to about 40% (7). Now select the elliptical marquee tool from the tools palette, select the lower part and press the delete button (8). In order to get a similar result than shown in step 9, switch to the quick mask mode and draw a gradient, similar to the one show in the screenshot below. Now switch back to the standard mode and press the delete button.
Now our badge already looks quite okay, but it’s still some kind of flat. Of course we could use Photoshop’s bevel and emboss effect… but I prefer another technique: Once again load the selection of the basic shape, contract it by one pixel, create a new layer, fill the layer, set its opacity to 40% and its blending mode to “Overlay” (10). Now load the selection of the newly created layer, move it down one pixel (11) and press the delete button (12).
Now we create the bottom bevel the same way — but instead of “white” use “black” as fill color and reduce the layers opacity to about 20%. Congratulations you’ve just finished your glossy, three dimensional badge (13).
