Shooting Star Illustrator Tutorial

        This is not the only way you can create a shooting star,if you use your imagination you can create shooting stars in lots of creative ways,but this one is the most popular,I guess you have seen this type of shooting star in lots of places.
         I created the image above just for fun to show an example of how I integrate that type of star in a design and I will not show how I created it all,just the star,if I get requests for it,maybe I will show that some other time.For this look there are two methods you could use,one would be a lot of pen tool work
meaning that you would have to manually create the trails,but I will show a nice and easy method using illustrator's 3d feature called extrude and bevel.

         First things first,lets create a new document in Illustrator.Size does not matter,because we create a vector graphic which is perfectly scalable without any loss in the effective resolution.But if you know what size this should be at then use that size.It will save you the trouble of resizing it later.I went with a size of 500 point on 500.Color model I used CMYK.If you plan on creating this for the web use RGB.Raster effects, if for web 72 pixels/inch will be just fine,if for print you should use 300 dpi.In Illustrator CS5 we can see a snap to pixel grid option.This becomes important if you work for the web,to insure your graphics stay sharp even viewed as pixels.However it only affects straight vertical or horizontal lines.So depending on how you create the star it may have no effect on it.I will write more about this in the future,about pixel graphics,that means graphics made out of a bunch of squares and anti-aliasing.When you are done setting up the document hit the OK button and it will create the document for you.

In the toolbar,nested with the rectangle tool we have a so called star tool to.So click and hold on the rectangle tool than choose the star tool.If you click and drag out on your artboard it will create a star for you.Before you let go of the mouse button you can tap the up or down arrow keys to add more flares(or how they call those)or to subtract from the star.So hitting the down arrow key a few times will cause the star to morph into a triangle.When you are happy with you star let go of the left mouse button and it will place the star on the artboard.

          Now our star has a white fill and a black stroke applied to it by default.Then again when for print white is called paper.A printer does not use white pigment it just lets the color of the paper show trough,so you can't have white if you are not printing it onto a white sheet of paper.First of all I don't need that stroke applied to the star.The fastest way to get rid of that would be by pressing "x" to bring strokes to the front in the lower left corner of the interface and then you should hit"/",that will set the stroke to none.To change the fill you can hit "x" again,double click the fill symbol(white square) to make the color picker show up,or you could use a color from your color swatches panel(window/swatches,if you don't see it)or you can use the color panel to(window/color,if you don't see it).

 Ok,so recap!

          First make sure your object,in our case the star, is still selected.Click on it with the black arrow tool,witch is the top-most tool in the toolbar to select the object.As we can see in the image bellow the initial state of our star is a white fill with a black stroke applied to it.In the fill-stroke control area we can see the fill swatch rests on top of the stroke swatch,that means any color adjustment we make will affect the fill.So I just chose a green color from the swatches panel.(Window/swatches.if you can't find your swatches panel).

 And here it is after I clicked on the green swatch

         Now to get rid of the stroke,first hit "x" to swap the fill with the stroke,that means the stroke swatch will sit on top of the fill swatch now,and then hit "/" to set that to none,or you can hit the none button under the stroke swatch.

         And now comes the fun part!

         Make sure your object is still selected,if not click on it with the black arrow tool.Go to effect/3d/extrude and bevel and a dialog box should appear.

          First hit the preview button so you can see what happens.The result is a true 3d object inside of illustrator,not just some effect.So you can spin your object anyway you like by spinning the big box in the window.
 So,you can rotate your 3d object anyway you like by clicking and dragging over that big box in the window,and you will see the X,Y and Z coordinates change,or you can enter manually some numbers into the input fields.If you take a good look at the box,or our star you will notice that there is something funny about them.The back part of them,that should be further away from our eyes and should be slightly smaller then the front part is the same size as the front part,making it look a little bit distorted.Here is where perspective comes into play.Right now is set to zero,but it controls how small the back part of the extruded object will be.
The extrude depth controls the thickness of the object,with the cap option you can decide whether you want a filled object or a hallow object.The bevel option is set to none,that is why the height option is grayed out.My English is not good enough to explain what bevel is,but you should try out the options and see what they do.But here is a nice example of what you can do with the bevel option.

           So I choose classic bevel from the drop down menu.Then I played around with the height until I got this result.The height depends on the size of the object,so a bigger object will need a higher value in the height option for this same result.I also added some perspective to the object.For the shading most of the time plastic shading will be all that you need but feel free to experiment with the other ones too.Now lets enter the setting essential to create our shooting star!

          So as you can see I pushed extrude depth to the max and perspective to,then I rotated it with the help of the box in a position that I liked.I used no bevel that one is set to none.Next click on the "More options" button.In the image above it says "fewer options" because when you click the more options button the window expands to show more options and the button turns into a "Fewer options" button.Here we can set the lighting of the 3d object.By default in the area highlighted with red you can see only one light source lighting that sphere.In my example you can see two dots symbolizing two light sources.I created the other one by hitting the middle button under the sphere the one that looks like a new layer button.You can position your light sources by clicking and dragging them.As long as you have preview checked you can see the lighting of the object change as you move the light source.I used one light from the front and one from the side.Light intensity controls the intensity of the light source obviously.Ambient light,well you should think of it like the sun,or the light that lights up an entire room.So increasing the intensity will evenly lighten the entire object or decreasing it will darken the whole object.Highlight intensity controls how bright the highlights will be on an object,highlight size controls the size of the highlight on the object,and blend steps control how smooth the highlight will appear on an object.We haven't talked bout blends in Illustrator yet,but smooth highlights are achieved by blends.If you expand the 3d appearance on a shiny object you will see that the highlight on it is created by lots of shapes.
I will quickly create one just so you get the idea.

So I created this 3d star with the settings shown in the image above.By the way,hitting "Ok" on the extrude and bevel window will only create a virtual appearance for our star.That means it is re-editable.You can go to the appearance panel(window/appearance,if you don't see it).There you can double click where you see extrude and bevel to bring up again the extrude and bevel dialog.Just make sure you object is selected.

         From the appearance panel you can re-edit effects applied to an object by double clicking the name of the effect,or you could delete it by clicking on the effect to make it active than clicking on the trash can icon.You can choose other effects that you wanna apply from here to by hitting the fx icon,or you can add more fills and strokes to an object.
         I just realized I added to many blend steps,so I went back and reduce it to 13.If I zoom in you can see that banding on the object.That is the blend.

         But getting back to our shooting star.So far so good,and its just good enough if you don't want a shooting star with a bent tail.But if you want one with a bent tail you will need to expand its appearance.Also if you want to change the color of some part you will need to expand appearance to.Now it is only a virtual appearance of the object,that is what makes it re-editable,but in order to edit the tail we need to convert it tho a physical appearance.This will make the 3d effect non editable and will brake down the object into multiple shapes.Go to object/expand appearance.

         Now we can see a bunch of paths showing each separate objects shape that it created while expanding.They are all grouped together.For the sake of simplicity lets ungroup them.Go to object/ungroup.Do this more times until you see the ungroup option grayed out.Now you can select each part of the shooting star individually.But I want you to take the black arrow tool and click and drag in such way that you are touching each part of the tail with the rectangle you create(but not the star).When you release the mouse button you have selected all of the tail's components.Hit cmd/ctrl+G to group these together.Or go to Object/Group.Now we have the tail components in a group.Now with the tail group still selected go to Object/Envelope distort/Make with warp.I went with these settings:

          Now we want to expand this envelope distortion to so go to Object/Expand.Now we have a curved shape that still is in a group.We still need to position a few anchor points and we are done.Because the tail components are grouped together you can't select the components with the black arrow only if you double click the tail to enter the group but with the white selection tool you can still click and move individual anchor points.First make sure smart guides are turned one.Hit cmd/ctrl=U for that.Now as you hover your mouse over the screen it will appear in bright green over what you are currently hovering your pointer over(anchor,line or handle).Now with the white arrow tool click on the corners of the tail and drag them into place.When you see next to your cursor with bright green the word anchor appear let go of the mouse.The two anchor point will land on each other creating a perfect alignment.Sometimes the lines will get curved as you move anchor points around leaving parts of the tail showing from under the star where they should not be visible.Grab the handle with the white arrow tool and drag it around to curve the line in such way that it hides that part of the tail.

        I did not create screen shoots about these last steps,because I already explained this in the previous tutorial,the stylish button tutorial.If you don't know what anchor points,line segments and handles are you can read more about them there.And also how to move them with the white arrow tool.

STYLISH WEB BUTTON IN ILLUSTRATOR

 
    Before we start creating the button you have just seen above in Illustrator,I should point out what a vector graphic is ,just in case some people are not familiar with it.SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics are shapes defined by paths or so called bezier curves,named after a  mathematician from France.These are perfectly scalable without any loss in the effective resolution because it is not made out of a bunch of small squares or so called pixels.So one of the advantages of SVGs is scalability and smaller file size.Witch one is better then the other it is hard to tell,I use both Photoshop and Illustrator for web or print design it just depends on witch one fits my needs better for that particular project.

   As we can see in the image above sv Graphics stay perfectly smooth even when you zoom in close,but we can start seeing the pixels in the other one as we zoom in.Scaling pixel based Graphics may cause fuzziness viewed on screen or pour print quality because if you scale something up you start pulling pixels away from each other and each separate dot printed on paper by the printer will be visible if the effective ppi drops under 250 pixels/inch.On huge banners a resolution of 150ppi would be ok because people wont get that close to actually see the dots.

    But lets just start creating the button!

   Go to File/New to create a new document. I don't want a much larger artboard then the size of the button so I went with a width of 700 points and a height of 220 points.That is a pretty large size for a web button isn't it?Well I planned my steps ahead a little and I know I will be using the grid,which will be to large for a smaller sized button in that case I would have to play around with the grid settings from the preferences dialog(cmd/ctrl+K).It is just easier for me this way.For the color mode we can choose RGB because we design this button for the web,and monitors work in RGB mode.To stay on the safe side of things i set the raster effects resolution to a resolution of 72 ppi,or a so called screen resolution but I don't think it matters anyway since we are going to save it out for web and devices and everything will get rasterized at a 72ppi resolution anyway.
   To create our button shape click and hold on the rectangle tool until all the tools nested pop up then choose the rounded rectangle. You can create a rounded rectangle by clicking and dragging on the artboard,to adjust the corner radius you will have to tap the up or down keys on your keyboard(while you are still holding down your mouse button,when you let to the rectangle gets created)An other way would be to simply click on your artboard and then a pop up window will appear where you can enter in numerically the values for the width hight and corner radius.

    Once we have our shape we need to align it to the artboard.First make sure your object(the rounded rectangle) is still selected.Take the black arrow tool which is the top most tool in the tool bar and click on your rectangle with it.In the upper right corner(the highlighted area) we can find some alignment options.Just in case you can't find it,in some versions you will only have the word align there and you will have to click on it,or you can use the align panel.Just go to window/align and the panel will pop up.From there it is the same thing.First hit that small down pointing arrow and select align to artboard.Then hit the align centers vertically and align centers horizontally symbols and we are done.

I highlighted 3 areas of the screen because its these areas we should focus our attention in the next steps.And you can see that our object already has a gradient applied to it. I applied that just by pressing ">" on my keyboard.That tells Illustrator to apply the gradient settings from the gradient panel to the object or objects selected.

   First of all I wanna talk(write:P) about these panels and options just in case some ppl are not familiar with them,so it will be easy to follow the steps we are taking with our button.I will start with the options at the lower left corner of the application.

 Here we can set the fill and type of fill for our object and the stroke. that would be a line going around our object.
Every time you open up Illustrator it will start applying a white fill and a black stroke to objects you create. As you start changing setting it will apply these.So if you want to reset that to the default white fill and black stroke you will want to click that small reset symbol or just hit "D"on your keyboard."X" or that small double headed arrow will swap the fill with the stroke,or by clicking on the stroke it will bring it to the foreground.
We also have those 3 buttons at the bottom,we can add a solid color fill a gradient or set these to none by clicking on them or using they're shortcuts. So in our example i applied a gradient by hitting">" on my keyboard,now i want to set the stroke to none,because it has a black line going around that I don't need.I will hit "X" on the keyboard to bring stroke in front of fill then hit"/" to set stroke to none.And now the black line disappears.We can set these also from the upper bar.Whenever we have an object selected an the artboard we will have two swatches in the upper taskbar,one to change the fill color or set it to none and one for the stroke.Getting back to our lower left options,if you double click the fill swatch you can use the color picker to choose a fill color,no help for use because we are using a gradient now and it will just change our gradient to a solid color.To edit a gradient we have to move to the gradient panel.As well if you double click the stroke swatch you will be able to change the strokes color.You can't add a gradient to a stroke you will first have to convert the stroke to outlines.that means a separate object.

   Moving on to the gradient and color panels.If you don't see them then go to window/gradient and window/color.

 

 Well this one is just way easier to explain jumping straight to our example.

    First make sure your object is still selected.Click on the gradient bar in the gradient panel to see our color stops.Right now we have two color stops a white and a black one because we still have a white to black gradient applied to the object.To add more color stops u can click on the bottom of the gradient bar and it will add a color stop where you clicked.so we can have more then two colors in a gradient.To get rid of a color stop you can just click and drag it off the panel.Click on one color stop and adjust its grayscale value(K value) up in the color panel. Do the same for the other stop to.I wanted a more subtil gradient so i went light gray to darker gray.Now lets adjust the angle because the gradient is going left to right but we want it to go from the bottom up. type in 90 into the angle area.Bring the adjustment diamond closer to the lighter color because we want that lighter color more on the bottom of the button. The diamond defines the point of transition between the two colors.Before I forget,you can also move the stops by clicking and draging them to the left or right.You can adjust from where that particular color starts to blend in with the other one.You can also adjust color stops by double clicking on them and you will get a color panel like pop up window,but since we have our color panel there it is the faster way I guess.The type of our gradient should obviously be linear. from the type you could choose linear or gradient.If you choose radial then your radial gradient roundness option becomes active.You can adjust how round or oval your radial gradient should look like.How to add color to gradients we will see when we create the ribbon that wraps around our button.But first lets add the shine to the top of the button.
 
First make sure your object is still selected.Click on it with the black arrow tool if not or just hit cmd/ctrl+A.that tells illustrator to select all objects on the artboard but we only have our button shape now.
Now go to Object/Path/Offset path.

   In the dialog that pops up I will enter -2 points.This is my case scenario but for other projects you might want to check the preview box and experiment a little. Once you hit ok it will create an other shape that is slightly smaller in size.Now we have to go back to the gradient panel.If you have version CS5 you can choose from the presets fade to black by clicking that down pointing arrow marked in the image bellow.

    It applies a gradient that goes from transparent to black.So first you will want to inverse the gradient by hitting the inverse gradient button(shown in the image about the gradient panel) then click the black stop and change its color to white in the color panel.You can use the adjustment diamond to adjust how far the shine will stretch into the button.
   In case you have an earlier version you will have to use a black to white gradient and set its blend mode in the transparency panel to screen.So our newly created object still has the same gradient applied to it as the first one.You will want to go to the gradient panel click on each color stop and change they've color to white and the other to black.If black is on top of your button hit the reverse gradient button.In case you don't see the transparency panel,tho it should be next to the gradient panel then go to window /Transparency.Set the blend mode to screen,then go back to the gradient panel if needed to play with the adjustment diamond for a better look.Bellow you can see an image with the gradient panel,Transparency panel and the final result with the shine applied to the second shape.

Next it is time to create that ribbon looking thing.Go to View/Show Grid or use the shortcut Cmd/ctrl+" and View/Snap to Grid or its shortcut Shift+cmd/ctrl+".Now you should see a grid on your artboard.

   We will use the grid as a guide when we create the shape and the snapping option to snap the anchor points we will create to points on the grid.To create the shape we will use the Pen tool.The pen tool allows us to virtually create any shape we want.You can use the shortcut"p" or choose the tool from the tool bar.

With the zoom tool(shortcut "Z") zoom in to the area you are planning to work on.

As seen in the image above,with the pen tool (shortcut "P") I placed an anchor point in the corner of a square(a click with the pen tool adds an anchor point).Diagonally in the opposite corner click and drag downward to create a curved line.Clicking without dragging would just create a straight line segment between the two anchor points.Dragging also creates two handles for that particular anchor point.These control the way the curve looks.One of them controls how the line "enters" the anchor point,the other one controls the way it "exits".As you can see in the image above I dragged in such way that the handles are equal with a side of a square.You shouldn't have problems to create this same curve as long as you have "snap to grid " turned on.Because of that second handle creating a third anchor will bend the line segment for you without having to drag.So in case you don't want that to happen you need to option/alt+click with the pen to make the second handle dissapear and you will end up with a straight line when creating the third anchor.If you want to readjust a curve you need to option/alt+click on one of the handles and drag them to your liking.That will readjust the curve.In my case however even tho i will want a straight line I don't need to option/alt+click the anchor point. If you look closely you can see that the line straightens out before it enters the anchor.So it will come out the same way.

   As you noticed in the image above I continued adding anchors to finish my shape.To create the other side of the fold I clicked and dragged to the left this time,and to close the shape I clicked on the first anchor I created.It is not perfect yet but with the help of the white arrow tool and the grid it will look better in no time.The white arrow lets us select and move anchor points.To select multiple anchors you will need to shift click each one of them or click and drag out an area of selection and it will select all anchors that fall inside of that area.You can find the white arrow in the tool bar under or next to the black arrow depending on how your tool bar is set up.After you select the anchors you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move them and they will snap to the grid making it easy to find the perfect position for them.

As you can see in the image above I fine tunned the shape using the white arrow.

It is time to add a colored gradient to our shape.As I guess you already noticed as we created the shape it already added a gradient to it.The last gradient you used,that means either the white to transparency gradient or the white to black gradient if you used the method with the blend mode change.To change the white to transparent gradient you could just go to the gradient panel and choose a gradient from there then go ahead and edit that further.You should not forget that you can add delete and position color stops to your liking.
But the again you could also use the eye dropper to copy the style of an already existing shape.

First zoom in so you can clearly see that 2 points that stick out from our first object that we created.We have a second shape above it that contains our shine.If you click that with the eye dropper you will copy its style to the ribbon.You have to make sure your ribbon is selected.Click on it with the black arrow. You can select the eye dropper from the tool bar,as seen in the image above or just use the shortcut "I".Than click on the visible portion of our bottom most shape and it applies the same gradient to our ribbon.
If you take a look at the color panel you can see that we can only change a so called "k" value for each color stop that only changes the grayscale value of that particular color stop.If you take a close look at your color panel you will see some horizontal lines and a small down pointing arrow in the upper right corner of the panel.If you click that you will be able to choose other color modes,because right now grayscale is selected.You will want to choose RBG from there because we are creating this for the web,and monitors work in RGB mode because they use light.First make sure you have a color stop selected in the gradient bar we will have to change mode for each color stop.

In the image above I changed mode for the first color stop the left color stop in the gradient bar.As it changes its mode to RGB the color stays the same and you can see in the color panel that we have an R=B=G=158 value for it.In RGB mode we can only have grays or black and white if R=G=B. R=G=B=0=black,R=G=B=255=white.The rest are shades of gray.Now if you play around with the sliders it will start adding color to the stop.The easiest way would be to choose a color from the color bar on the bottom of the color panel(where you see lots of colors going from red to red on the sides and white to black from the top to the bottom.It is the color wheels linear representation.
In HSB mode if you add numerically color values you want to add them in degrees.You have to imagine a wheel of color 0 degrees mean red so 180 degrees means it complementary color cyan).
 Point being said you only have to click around to sample colors from that bar.After you are happy with your first stop click on the next one change its color mode to RGB then sample a color for it too.

This is my colored ribbon bellow.

Now lets create the back part of it.First hit Shitf+D to change the drawing mode from normal to draw behind.This will already draw our new object under all the already existing ones.

First make sure your ribbon IS NOT SELECTED any more. just cmd/ctrl+click on an empty portion of your artboard to deselect everything.Now with the pen tool("P") click on the same spot where you started the ribbon then go in the opposite direction and drag downward so that your handle rest on one side of the square and is equal in length.


Not deselecting your object would have caused the pen tool to delete that anchor point you have to click on to create the back side of the ribbon.Clicking on an already existing anchor with the pen will delete that anchor.It already ads the last gradient we used to our second shape,all you have to do now is go to the gradient panel,choose the darker color stop and in the color panel darken the G value of it by moving the slider to the left.

Things to do next!Right before we start forgetting that we are in draw behind mode lets reset that to draw normal by hitting two times shift+D,first time it will switch to draw inside mode the second time will switch to draw normal.Or you can just click the symbol and choose draw normal.We don't need the grid and the snapping option no more.Go to view/hide grid and view/snap to grid to uncheck that.Or hit cmd/ctrl+" and shift+cmd/ctrl+".
click and drag with the black arrow tool over the ribbon components to select both of them,without touching the button shape and shine.Tap the down arrow a few times to move both of them slightly downward if needed,well i found that it looks better if I move it down a little bit in my case.lets add a shine to the front part of the ribbon the same way we did with the button.select the front part with the black arrow tool,go to object/path/offset path and enter in a value of -2 and hit ok.then add a gradient the same way you did with the button.

 A drop shadow applied to the front part of the ribbon would make it look a lot better.Here is the part where we learn a few thing about the layers panel.now that we are having a bunch of objects on top of each other the easier way to select individual objects would be the layers panel.

First in the layers panel hit that small down pointing arrow circled with red to show all objects on that layer.They will be named path1.path2 and so on.Double click those names and rename tath the same way that I did in the dialog that pops up.This will help us keep track of things.
The button shine has a circle that is not hallow because it is a visual clue we have some sort of effect applied to that object. i got stuck using the transparency panel method with that when I was showing you can do it that way to if needed.The ribbon shine has no effect because it is a gradient that goes white to transparent.We can use those circles to select objects from the layer panel the same way you would do with the black arrow tool.So we want to select the front ribbon to add a drop shadow to it.Click on the circle next to its name to select it.
We call this "meatballing".So we have meatballed the ribbon front.Now go to effect/stylize/drop shadow.

I went with the settings above for my shadow.It really is a matter of taste.X and Y offset controls the position of the shadow.The blur controls how washed out it will look.You can also change the opacity and bland mode of it.Check preview and experiment.
But we have a problem.If you look close enough you can see the shadow extends beyond the size of our button.We don't want that.

 We need to add a clipping mask to it to fix this issue.By the way this drop shadow is re-editable because it is a virtual appearance. with the object selected you can go to the appearance panel(window/appearance if you don't see it) and you will find your objects stroke fill and other effects there.In our case the drop shadow.You can double click its name to edit it or drag the Fx to the trash can if you don't need it.To add a clipping mask we need to phisically create the shadow on the artboard.Go to Object/expand appearance(with the ribbon still selected.)This will create a separate shape out of the shadow and it will group it with the front ribbon.
In the layers panel a small arrow appears in front of the front ribbon shape.a visual clue that we have a group there.If you click the arrow you will see the two shapes the group contains.Thee ribbon and the shadow.However we don't need that group so meatball it and go to object/ungroup or hit shift+cmd/ctrl+G.we still are left with a group.The ribbon is a group of its own because the shadow is now ungrouped. so meatball the group again and hit shift+cmd/ctrl+G and that group dissapears to.

CLIPPING MASK STEPS

1.Meatball the button shape and hit cmd/ctrl+C to copy it.This is the shape we are going to use to create a clipping mask for the shadow.

2.Meatball Image which is the shadow object that I just forgat to rename and path is the ribbon front.I renamed those in the next step.Then hit cmd/ctrl+F or go to edit paste in front,and will paste an other button shape on top of our shadow object.the object on top will act as a mask for the object bellow so only the part that falls inside will be visible.

3.Meatball shadow and shift click on the circle of button to select them both at the same time and hit cmd/ctrl+7 and it will create a clipping mask.Or you can go to Object/clipping mask/Make to create a clipping mask.Once again the path on top acts as a mask for the path bellow that is selected.

Now all you have to do is add the text and some sort of symbol on the ribbon to have a stylish button.You can use the type tool(shortcut "t") click on the artboard and type in the text.To edit the size and color go to window/character.Once you are done with that with the black arrow tool you can position the text over the button by clicking and dragging it into place.
To create that two down pointing arrow heads I used the grid again and the snapping option.To scale objects select them with the black arrow tool then holding down shift drag from one of the bounding box corners.shift will insure that you are scaling proportionally.
I ain't going to do all these right now.I am confident by now you can do that on your own.I will jump to my already made button and show how to save it for the web.

Go to File/save for web and devices.In the preset roll down choose PNG-24.We are creating a 24 bit per pixel PNG file.I first tried PNG-8 but there was some banding in the gradients so 256 colors are not enough for this one.Why PNG? Because it can contain transparency for one,and we get good quality at a low file size.A JPG at the same file size would show some visible compression artefacts that would make our button look bad.And JPGs can't contain transparency.
Next go to image size.Make sure constrain proportions is checked.I just scaled down the size in percent to 40% of the original size.It looks like a good size for the button to me.You can also enter the size numerically if you have an idea how long and wide the button should be in the length and width fields.also make sure transparency is checked,then hit apply and ok.And there we have it! a button on a transparent background that you can use over any layout.

BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES WITH PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM AND CAMERA RAW

      First of all thank you to Sebastian Craciun for correcting the first part about Lightroom.Don't blame him for errors in the second part;)
      NOTE
      In this post I continue to talk about black and white images if you haven't read the first one maybe it will be a good idea to read that first,where I explain the basics behind creating black and white images in Photoshop but hopefully you will be able to use the basic idea presented in other software to once you understand it.
      Camera Raw and Ps Lightroom are basically the same thing so you do things the same exact way in them.
Camera Raw is Photoshop's and Bridge's raw image editor,it is not a crime to use it on JPG images tho. I guess some think that Camera Raw is only for raw image files,in other words 14-16 bit/channel images.Or so called deep color images. That means they can contain more colors as JPG images for example. JPGs are true color images,8 bits/channel that means 24bit/pixel images. Images come out from a digital camera in RGB color mode,that is why RGB is a device dependent color space. Monitors, displays work in RGB because they use light. That means we have three channels. So that is why 8 bits per channel = 24 bits/pixel. 3x8=24.The bits/channel define up to how many colors can be contain by an image. 8bits mean 2 on the 8th(8 times 2x2),what is equal with 256.That means 256 shades in each channel(Red,Green,Blue) so if we count all possibilities that is 256x256x256= a max of 16,777,216 colors in a JPG image.Obviously a raw image file can contain a lot more then that,no wonder they are called deep color images,more colors mean bigger file size but better quality because with more colors it can map fine details more accurately. When you convert a raw image to JPG it uses a color quantification algorithm to reduce the number of colors to a max of 16 million colors.
      Haven't you ever wondered why you never see the led of your TV remote control light up? It's wave length exceeds what our eyes can perceive. So it is in the imaginary colors range(because we can't see it).
But take a picture of it while you push a button and you will see how it lights up. My guess is that that is color quantification in action.(or maybe there is an other reason for that,hell I ain't a rocket scientist!).
As I was saying maybe some think Camera Raw can only be used on Raw images because by default whenever you try to open up a Raw image in Photoshop it opens it in Camera Raw first. We used to be able to change that in Photoshop's preferences dialog(cmd/ctrl+K)But in the newest version of Photoshop I haven't seen this option anymore,or maybe I need glasses.Camera Raw became so popular that they made a new software out of it,Photoshop Lightroom.It is a combination of Bridge and Camera Raw,that means the file managing abilities of Bridge and the editing power of Camera Raw in one. It became a specially designed software for photographers. It is an image editing tool so it can't be used for advanced image manipulation or graphic design.Editing done in Camera Raw and Lightroom can only be seen in bridge or the soft itself,respectively Photoshop in case you just hit done and don't export it as a JPG or other image file.That means your Windows picture and fax viewer won't or other image viewing tool you use notice no change on the image. That happens because we do not physically edit the pixel in the image,it only writes a set of rules on how the pixels in the image should be displayed on screen. The good thing about it is that everything we do is re-editable at anytime and it does not increase file size.

     Let's open up an image in Lightroom

 First you should hit the Import button at the bottom,it will open up a dialog box as predicted because we can se those three"..." after the word Import. That just means it will open up a dialog box.in the dialog locate your image then hit import again at the bottom of the dialog. We end up with our image in the library section(highlighted at the top).I want you to notice that in Lightroom we also have
a quick develop panel too. If you only need the adjustments you can find in the basics panel of Lightroom you don't need to switch from Library to Develop,you have them all there on the right side. You will need to click the small triangles on the right to expand all the sections but there you have all the adjustments.
It is not the best way to create black and white images,but it can be done from quick develop to.

 

First click on the triangle to expand the section,then change treatment from color to black and white. Then you can experiment with the other settings,some of them have confusing names like "Recovery","Clarity"
I will dedicate a whole post soon on explaining what all those are,in case some people are not familiar with these adjustments,but for now there is nothing wrong if you just experiment,you will figure out a few things on your own.

Now lets see a better way of creating b&w images in Lightroom.

Click on Develop(next to library).Collapse all other panels by clicking on the triangles next to their name(basic,tone curve)if they are open. Now expand the HSL/Color/B&W section. Click on B&W and now all you have to do is adjust the sliders to your liking to darken or lighten the colors that fall in the range of that specific slider.
If you feel you should reset some sliders you can double click on their triangle and it will jump back to zero. On the left side of the panel there is that small switch circled with red. You can use it to turn on and off the effect of that panel. But in this case if you turn of the effect the image will still remain black and white but
without the tonal changes we made with the help of the sliders. Why is that? If you go back to the basic panel,you will see that it has automatically changed the treatment from color to Black and white.

NOTE
If you looked at the histogram while converting to black and white it looks like it switched from showing the histogram of three channels to only one channel. It is not that,where all three channels overlap it shows up as gray in the histogram,now all of the histogram is gray. We can only have grays in an RGB image when R=G=B,remember?(read the previous post).

I hope I did not leave out anything essential for this post,giving the fact that Lightroom is a fairly complex tool,but lets move on to Camera raw now.

2.CAMERA RAW
Well if you have Photoshop,I'm not talking bout Lightroom,I mean big bad Photoshop then you have Camera Raw(tho I don't know since what version they introduced it) and also if you have Bridge,witch comes in a pack with just about any Adobe product I guess,such as Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and of course Photoshop,then you have Camera Raw.Those that mean we can have two instances of Camera Raw at the same time? Yes it does!
By the way,Camera Raw was created by Thomas Knoll,the same guy who created Photoshop back 21 years ago.But yeah,why would you want to run two instances of Camera Raw at the same time? Well you could have one of them do some batch processing while you could use the other one for other jobs.
So unless you try to open up a raw image file you will have to open up Bridge to use Camera Raw.By default it will first open it in Camera Raw hosted by Photoshop and once you click done it will jump to Photoshop preserving your Camera Raw settings.In case you don't know where your Bridge hides,I can only help Windows users,check your program files folder,there you will see an adobe folder and in that a bridge folder.

Once you open Adobe Bridge you can use the folder tab to locate your file or you can use the path bar located at the top.Click on the image or ctrl+click if you want to open more images up at the same time for batch-processing,then you can hit that small shutter looking button at the top to open images is in Camera Raw hosted by Bridge,or you can hit Ctrl+R for that or just right click and choose open with>Camera Raw.If you want to open an image up in Camera Raw hosted by Photoshop you will want to hold down ctrl+O,this will open both Photoshop and Camera Raw,and once you hit open image in Camera Raw it will import your work into Photoshop.However in version CS5 if you want to open up a JPG image it will just open it up in Photoshop skipping Camera Raw tho if I remember correctly,and I should because I'm not that old yet,in version CS3 it did first open your image in Camera Raw even if a JPG.Now you need a JPG that already has Camera Raw settings applied to it in order to open it up first in Camera Raw.(that would be cmd instead of ctrl in the above shortcuts if you use a Mac).

Once you open your image up,you can see the same basic adjustments we saw earlier in Lightroom.The HSL/Grayscale tab is the fourth tab located in the area marked with red.

After you hit the fourth tab you can see a new set of adjustment options,as seen in the image above.Hue/Saturation/Luminance tabs control the hue,the saturation or the lightness of each color range slider but the option we are interested in is the convert to grayscale check box.Once you check that we only have the Grayscale Mix sliders to adjust each colors lightness(to assign a shade of gray for each color) for a better looking B&W image.

 

 Point being said Lightroom and Camera Raw are user friendly apps so if you are planning on using soft only for retouch and restoration jobs you should consider using Lightroom and Photoshop Elements to help it out in case you want to combine more pictures because you can't do that in Lightroom.In case you want to use a free soft you can try the GIMP witch offers lots of advanced options.Once you will learn how to use it I bet you will be glad you downloaded it.
We also have some online solutions these days.You don't need to download and install nothing(just flash player in case you don't have it installed).You only need a net browser and an Internet connection. Go to www.aviary.com where you can find a whole bunch of editing tool from an advanced image editor to a vector based editor,sound mixer,effects creator,image mark-up tool.An other online image editing tool is SumoPaint.Go to www.sumopaint.com