Free Photoshop Tutorials

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In this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to make a nice, professional navigation set that you might see on a business website of some sort.

1.

Firstly create a new blank document in Photoshop. For this tutorial I used a small size of 400 x 400 pixels and left the background as white.

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer or CTRL+SHIFT+N) now make a selection in the middle of the document sized about 200 x 280 pixels.

After you made your selection fill it with a color of your choice, I used a nice purple #4f5467.

I then applied this Gradient Overlay to my navigation box layer. (Layer > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay…)

That just gives it a subtle little touch

2.

Now let’s add some nice effects to the navigation box. Start by selecting your main box by holding CTRL and clicking the layer’s thumbnail. Contract the selection by 1 pixel at Select > Modify > Contract in the Photoshop menus.

Make a new layer then draw a white gradient from the top left inwards a little bit.

Now you can either use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to make a straight selection across the right, and delete it, or you can use the Pen Tool to make a nice, curvy selection like so:

So if you know your way around the Pen Tool, go ahead and do that, but if you don’t, I’m not really going to go into detail of the Pen Tool in this tutorial.

After you deleted part of the gradient, use a large, soft brush and erase away the edges slightly, it gives it a really nice look.

Change the Layer Mode for this layer to Soft Light and lower the opacity about 20%.

It should look a lot more blended-in now:

3.

Repeat all of Step 2 but using the bottom right corner. I came up with this:

Looking good so far.

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