Understanding design trends and how to recreate popular effects for your site projects can lead to a better site design and overall theme.
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, I will show you how to create a brushed metal menu bar from scratch, similar to the ones used in Apple designs.
To begin, I will show you how to create the necessary gray gradient for the brushed metal effect. With the gradient in place, I will show you how to add noise to the canvas as a foundation for the brushed metal texture. Next, I will show you how to apply a motion blur to the added noise to complete the texture effect.
With the brushed metal texture created and applied to the menu bar, I will show you how to quickly lay in text similar to the text found on the menu bar on Apple's home page. I will also walk you through quickly creating dividers between the different links as well as how to create a simple mouse down effect.
By the end of this tutorial, you should have learned how to create a brushed metal texture that can be applied to shapes and fonts inside Adobe Photoshop CS4.
