Glossy Black Panel With Photoshop
In this photoshop tutorial, we’re gonna draw a Glossy Black Panel! It’s a nice and simple technique and of course very useful in order to get used to glossy perceptions! You will also learn in this tutorial some nice selection techniques and shortcuts. As usual, I will show you the final result in the beginning:
Let’s Start:
1. Create a new photoshop blank image with a white background (Recommended dimension: 400×250). Then select the Rounded Rectangle Tool and set the foreground color to Black. Make a shape similar to the following:
2. Now, select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and create a selection similar to the following:
3. Invert the selection by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I. The selection will look like the following:
4. Now, we will use the most useful shortcut in photoshop (at least for me): We want to select the intersection between the current selection and the rounded rectangle black shape that we drew in step 1. Hold CTRL + SHIFT + ALT and Click on the Preview Icon of the shape in the Layers panel. The selection should look like the following:
5. Press CTRL + SHIFT + N to create a new layer. On this new layer we will draw the glossy part of the panel. So, select the Gradient Tool, set the foreground color to White and drag the mouse from down to up:
6. You should get something similar to this:
7. Press CTRL + D to remove the selection:
8. Now, we will set the transparency of this layer to 20%. You can do that by editing the transparency of this layer from the Layers panel and here’s what you should see:
9. Let’s type some text with a font you choose and a white color:
10. In order to do a clean vector based reflection, we will duplicated the layer (Right Click on the Text layer in the layers menu and press Duplicate Layer). Now press CTRL + T to make some transformation with the new duplication. Drag the top of the selection down to get something simillar to this:
11. Move the selection up using the Up Arrow Key in your keyboard to reach this state:
12. Press Enter to validate the transformation. Then set the transparency level of this duplication to 20% the same way we did to the gradient layer to have something simllar to this:
13. Now, go the the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options… and select the Gradient Overlay option. You should have the following settings:
14. And press OK to get this result:
15. And here’s the final result after I’ve added some shadow to the Rounded Black Shape (Specs: Distance=0, Size=5):
The purpose of this tutorial is to show you some useful shortcuts you can use frequently!
Stay Tuned 
I am Elie El Khoury, from Lebanon (Byblos), Woopra co-founder & CIO, Web & Software Developer, Designer, Guitarist, Mac user and the worst blogger on earth! 
