Brushed Metal Textured Button

Posted on Wed, 2007-02-21 11:18

This tutorial will teach you how to create a textured button with a brushed metal feel. This tutorial requires the use of the Channels tab so it will not work on Elements, unless you use a square button or the rounded rectangle tool.

This tutorial takes in to account that you have a beginners knowledge of Photoshop.

Create a new canvas or use an existing canvas that you wish to put the buttons on.
Select the rectangular marquee tool (Keyboard shortcut: M).
Draw a rectangle roughly the size that you want it, try to keep it in the center of the document you can move the actual button later on. Click on the Channels tab in the Layers panel. Click the Save Selection as Channel (the icon looks like a rectangle with a circle inside it).
Deselect the selection by holding down Ctrl and pressing D. This will deselect the marquee. Single click on the Alpha 1 layer. Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. What you set this to depends on how rounded you want your corners. I am using 15px to get large rounded corners.
You will now have a blurred white rectangle which has curved corners. We need to tidy this up. Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels or hold Ctrl and press L.
Your levels will be different to mine if you didn't use 15px. If you used 15px set the levels to 139, 1.00, 150. If not see the image below. You want the grey arrow to point in the middle at 1.00. Then the white arrow should be to the right but should not go past the 1st spike up. The black arrow should be to the left but should not go past the 1st spike.

Levels
Once you are happy press OK. You should now have a nice rectangle with rounded corners.

Rounded rectangle in Channels tab
In the Channels tab hold down Ctrl and single click the Alpha 1 channel. This will make a selection of the rounded rectangle.
Now switch back to the Layers tab and create a new layer. On your new layer fill the selection with black. Either duplicate this layer or create another layer and fill the selection with black again.
On the bottom of these 2 layers apply a gauissian blur of 5px and set the opacity to 80%. This will give you a light shadow around the button.

Button Shadow
Create another new layer above the 2 previous layers. Once again make a selection of the Alpha 1 channel, you can do this by holding Ctrl and single click the top black rectangle as we haven't modified it. Fill this new selection using #666666 which is a mid grey.
Now set the foreground colour to white (#FFFFFF) and select the gradient tool. Set the gradient to foreground to transparent, which is the second default graident.

Foreground to Transparent Gradient
On the same layer as the grey rectangle draw a gradient straight down from just above the rectangle to around 4/5 of the way down like so:

Drawing the Gradient
Now set the opacity of this layer to 80%. The end result should be a grey rectangle with a slight graident from top to bottom.

Smooth button
Now to add the brushed metal effect, create a new layer and fill it completely with white (#FFFFFF).
Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise.
Set to 400%, Gaussian and tick the Monochromatic box. Press OK.
You should now have a layer of noise. Now we will use the motion blur filter to give it a brushed texture. Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur.
Set the angle to 0 so that it is a horizontal blur and set the amount to something around 60 (50-100). Press OK.
Hold down Ctrl and click the grey rectangle layer to make a selection of our button. Go to the Select menu and hover over Modify then press Contract. Set this to 2px.
Go back to the Select menu but this time, select Feather rather than the Modify menu. Set this to 2px.
Hold down Ctrl and Shift and press I (i). This will invert the selection. You can also do this by going to the Select menu and selecting Inverse.
With the selection active and the layer with our motion blur applied selected press Delete on your keyboard. This will remove all the noise from around the button.
Set the blend mode of this layer to Soft Light. You should now have a finished button with a textured metal finish.

Textured Button