Aqua-Soft Forumshi there folks.. ahmm.. im trying to make some text icons in a native font (in Hindi/Sanskrit) .... and iv run into some trouble in trying to get the font reflection working properely ... it was pretty easy sailing until i got to the gradient overlay area... iv attached thumbnails which u can click to see the issues...
okay... so... let me break this down into my objective... and how i went about trying to achieve it :
OBJECTIVE :
creating reflective text icons ... the reflections have a gradient fall towards transparency at the end ...
what i want to achieve: basically, i want to get my icon "fndr" to look like the icon "phsh" in terms of the reflective text and how it nicely tapers into becoming transparent against any background.
PROBLEM:
as u can see the reflective text part of "phsh" starts of dark and then it becomes totally transparent against the background... on the other hand... the one i tried to create (fndr) shows a nasty whitish gray snare at the end of the refletive end (visible in the second picture) ... (in the first picture of the two, it's not visible because of the white background) ... so .. basically i want to get rid of the white snare and be able to make it fade into transparency so that it doesnt come up against any background... so .. basically i want to pretty much make it similar to the " phsh" reflection .
WHAT I DID:
(1) opened a new psd ... 128*128 px... with "background contents" set to "transparent" ( i dnt want it to have a black/ white background by default... wanted it to mesh in with the any background that it's placed in...) ...
(2) entered text... (fndr) ... created a duplicate layer... went to edit/transform/flip vertically... brought down the duplicate layer ...
(3) with the duplicate layer selected... went to layer/layer style/blending options ... reduced opacity to about 50% or so ... then went to the gradients overlay selection ... selected "blend mode" as normal, "opacity" let it remain at 100%, checked the reverse tab .. selected the "foreground to background" choice in gradient editor [by teh way .. i also tried tinkering around with foreground to transparent and black, white in the gradient editor... ]
(4) tinkered around with the "opacity stop"and "color stop" markers to see whether i could get the lower end of the relective text to totally fade away.. but couldnt manage it.. hence left it back at default...
(5) brought the "scale" marker down to 40% ... (found that the top area of the reflective text that was dark is shortened ... which i wanted a bit... but still it ddnt do anything to make the lower part transparent) ...
it'ld be really nice if someone could tell me what to do in order for me to get the reflection tapering down towards transparency .... thanks!
.. the tutorials below helped...