In response to the frequently requested Web tutorials, this month’s Art Department will focus on producing fancy buttons for snazzing up your home pages. Below you will find the instructions for making buttons using Adobe Photoshop:
1) Select the area to be “buttoned.”
2) Fill it with the colour of your choice.
3) With the selection still active, go to the “Channels palette” and choose “New
Channel…” from the Channels menu.
4) Name the new channel “Original mask,” and fill it with white.
 
5) Duplicate this mask by dragging it onto the “Page” icon at the bottom of the
“Channels palette.”
6) Blur the duplicated channel according to your resolution (normally 3–5 pixels is
enough).
7) Emboss the blurred image (default settings work just fine normally).
8) Name (by double-clicking) this channel “Emboss1.”
 
9) Duplicate the channel “Emboss1” and name the resulting channel “Emboss2.”
10) Invert the channel “Emboss2” (Under Image->Adjust).
11) Call up the Levels window either by the menus or by pressing command-L
12) Here is the tricky part: get the black pipette in the Levels menu and click on the
grey of both the channels “Emboss1” and “Emboss2” one at a time
The resulting images should look something like this:
 
13) Now return to the layers palette and click on the layer you are working on.
14) Load the selection of the “Original Mask” channel (Select->Load Selection…).
 
15) Load the selection of the “Emboss1” channel (Select->Load Selection…) but this
time make sure the “Intersect with Selection” checkbox is ticked
