Photoshop Christmas Button
In this weeks tutorial we will learn how to create this nice Christmas Special “Buy me now” Button. And, since Christmas is all about flashy things, colorful images, Santa, you name it; we’ll use Green and Red as our default colors!
Well let’s get started! Start Photoshop (If you do not have it already opened) and create a new document. Since this will be just a little button, try not to make it to big. A 160x70 Pixels document will do the job.
In my opinion, Buy Now buttons look cooler if they have rounded corners. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it really gives an extra to the design. Let’s try to make a rounded corner button shall we? :D.
Step 1. The button’s shape.
To create rounded corners we need the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), and the drawing style set to Path.
Draw something similar to this with the Rounded Rectangle Tool:
In order to fill this path with color, we need to create a new layer (Layer->New-> Layer or CTRL/COMMAND + SHIFT + N) and pick our Pen Tool (P) then right-click on the path and select Fill.
We decided to use Red and Green right? We will fill this path with #88bb22 or something similar to this green.
It’s time to add some layer styles (Layer->Layer Styles):
This days everything has to be web2.0-ish so we will now create a glass effect to keep up with the standards. Press CTRL or COMMAND and click on the layer icon, also called the layer thumbnail. We have two layers until now.
This should make this selection as seen above. Now we need to create a new layer(Layer->New ->Layer) on top of the button layer (Called Shape in my case) and grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool – what a stupid name O_o -, the Circle Selection Tool found under the M hotkey.
Now if we chose the “intersect with” option from the Tool Control Bar we can intersect a new selection that we will draw with the older selection that we made with the layer thumbnail.
Time to draw the new selection.
That wasn’t to hard, was it ? Now we can simply fill (Edit->Fill) the selection with white on the top layer and set it’s opacity to 15-25%.
This part is done. Now it’s time to add some text and a snowflake.
Step 2. The White Snowflake.
Let’s now make this button look like a huge Photoshop skill showoff shall we? We’ll simply use a plain white text.
The snowflake will go in the left side of the button. To draw it we need a new layer (Layer->New->Layer). We already have the path of snowflakes in our custom shape tool menu so we will take it from there and draw a small snowflake path. The path that I used is from the shapes that ship with the basic version of Photoshop CS3 so you should have it also.
Once we draw it, we can fill it with white, on the new layer.
Right now, the static button is finished. There is another thing we could do in this step: adding outer glow to the snowflake.
It seems that some error accrued and not all the tutorial was shown O_o. I am sorry for the inconvenience created.
Step 3. The Animation.
It’s now time to add the fade-ins and outs. We want to do that to the outer glow of the snowflake and to the border of the button. But those are all layer styles! How could we possibly do that?! Don’t worry, it’s really easy!
There is a little trick here. Pay close attention now. We are looking at the layers pallet.
Those “fx” symbols contain all the layer styles. You might not have any “fx” symbols if you don’t have CS3, however that will not stop you from completing this tutorial, so don’t worry.
The idea this: If you right click on that highlighted area, you should see some more options in the right-click-menu.
Notice the difference? You should. Chose “Create Layers”. This will generate separate layers for each layer style that we created earlier.
Apply this technique to the Button Layer, called shape for me, and to the snowflake layer also. We should all have something similar to this now:
Don’t panic if it looks a bit different for CS2 or CS version, it’s still the same stuff your dealing with.
Now it’s time to work with the animation itself. In order to open the animation panel we need to go to Window -> Animation. Again, in CS3 this panel will be a bit different, but you can follow along if you are in CS1-2.
Let’s start the animation by selecting the stroke layer of the button and setting it’s opacity to 30%.
This is the start frame. If you look in the animation panel, there is only 1 frame, named “1”. The changes will affect only this frame.
Now that we set the opacity accordingly, we will do the same for the snowflake outer glow layer.
Set this layers opacity to 30%. I know this does not change the overall aspect to much but when being animated, it will stand out a lot :).
What we done here is set the first frame of the animation to a semitransparent state. Photoshop can auto-generate frames like these, all he needs is a beginning frame, and an end frame. Now we will create the end frame. To do that, all we need to do is to click the “duplicate selected frames” button.
We should have 2 frames identical frames now. The blue frame is the selected on. You can select frame by clicking the frames you with to edit. Keep that in mind if thing get out of control for you.
With the second frame selected, we now need to reset the opacity of the 2 layers that we changed in frame 1 back to 100%. This is the “first” end of the animation.
With that done, we now need to create the animation between those 2 frames. To do that we will use the “Tween Animation Frames” option. First we must select both frames by holding CTRL or COMMAND down while clicking the frames and then clicking the Tween Button.
The Tween Dialog box should appear. Here we can chose how many frames we want to tell Photoshop to create between those to frames that were selected.
15 Frames is more than enough. Use the same amount of frames if you want to have the same effect as mine.
One more thing to do and we’re done! Right now the animation seems to get stuck at some point and “malfunction”. It jumps from full opacity to low opacity in an instant right?
There is a play button near the Tween Animaton Frames, just in case you didn’t know :P you can preview the animation by clicking it.
How are we going to solve this problem? Simple! We need to go to the last frame (Frame 17 in my animation) and look at it. It has the maxim opacity on all layers. We need another transaction from full to low. To do that we will duplicate the last Frame by selecting it and pressing the duplicate button as shown before.
In this new frame, frame 18, we will set the opacity of our 2 troublesome layers to 30% ( the 2 layers are the outerglow of the snowflake and the stroke of the button, don’t forget that :) ).
After setting the opacity to 30%, we can create the second tween between frame 17 and 18. Select the two frames and create the same tween as show above.
Here’s the final result :D
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did writing it. Cheers! And Merry Christmas! :)
