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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Make a stylish search icon

- Open a new file of 512x512px. Fill it with black.

- set your foreground colour to #3877BD

- Select the Ellipse Tool and draw out a circle of 250x250px and position it as shown below:



- Select the Rectangle Tool and draw out a rectangle of 100x350px. go to Edit > Transform path and rotate it by 45°

- Place it as shown in the screenshot:



- While holding down Ctrl - click on both layers in the layer window.

- Right-click and select 'Merge layers'

- Next - go to Layer > Layer Style and add a white inside border of 15px

- In the layer style window - go to Inner glow and apply the following changes:


Colour used for the Inner Glow is #1e2732

- Go to Outer Glow and apply the following settings:


Outer Glow colour is black (#000000)

This is what you should have so far:



- Get the Elliptical Marquee Tool out and create a circle of 170x170px.
You can set this value in the toolbar:



- Position this selection in the center of the magnifying glass. (Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge the selection left, right, up or down.)

- Fill it with white

- Right-click inside this selection and select 'Layer via Copy'.

- Add a white outside stroke of 5px to this copied layer.

- Create a new layer and select a Soft Mechanical Brush of 100px (you can find this brush in the 'Basic Brushes' set)

- Make sure your foreground colour is set to white and click once somewhere on your new layer.

- Position it as shown below:



- Select the magnifying glass layer again - and click with the Magic Wand inside it.

- Go back to the brush layer and go to Select > Inverse.
- Press Delete

- Delete the background, merge the layers, resize it to an appropriate size and you're done.

The result in different sizes:




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In cs3 after merging the two layers, Layer, Layer Style is not available.

-L said...

@Anonymous: Just double-click the merged layer to get to it's Layer Styles.