I haven’t posted for a long time so this is how I’m going to make up for all of it. I have created a new tutorial in which I will be explaining how to create something like in this bottom picture. It is very simple so there is no experience needed.
If you want to read it, click Read More.

First create a new document any size you want (depends on how big you want your navigation) and put the background color #dfeacf .

Create a new layer and grab you Marquee Selection Tool. Now make a selection which is going to be your navigation and fill it with any color you want (the color doesn’t matter cause we are going to add Blending Options to it).

Now right click on that layer and select Blending Options. Add these options to it:

After you did that you should have something like this:

Now let’s add some seperators. Create a new layer and press “D” on your keyboard. Now grab your “Pencil Tool” and select the square brushes. Put the size (“Master Diameter”) to 1px. Now make 1 black and one white line next to it like this:

After you did that put the layer on “Overlay” and “Opacity” to 70%. Now you can just duplicate that layer and put it on several places (depends on how many buttons you have).

Now lets add a hove effect. Create a new layer and select one of those buttons (squares). Take out your “Gradient tool” and fill the squares with these two colors: #3c95cc and #52aee6 (make sure that the first one is the upper color).

Make sure that you have placed the layer right. It should be one pixel inside the navigation like this:

Now right click that layer and add the following “Blending Options”:

Now you should be having something like this:

As you can see, the hover effect went a little over the edge, so let’s fix it! Create a new layer and grab your “Pencil Too”l. Select the Square Brushes and put the size to 1 px. Just select the colors you need and start painting them like this:

Now everything should be ok like this:

Let’s add some light effect to the button, shall we? Create a new layer and select half of the button. Put your color to white (#ffffff) and grab your “Gradient Tool”. In the left upper corner of your screen click on the image of the gradient and select “Foreground to Transparent”:

Now use that gradient on tha image and you will have something like this:

After you did that you can deselect the layer and put it to “Overlay” and change the opacity to 20%. It looks better now, doesn’t it?

Oh, I forgt to add to add a bit more lighting with “Dodge Tool”. So what are you waiting? Let’s do it. Grab your “Dodge Tool” and select 60 px soft brushes , put the Range to “Highlits” and Exposure to 15%. Now select the blue layer and make a few brush strokes left and right until you get the light you wanted, like I did:

Hehe, now it looks even better. See, I told you:

I think that we’re done with that button, now let’s add some text. Select your “Type Tool” (T) and grab any font you like and put the color black (#000000). I have used “Arial Narrow”, Regular, 12 px size and Smooth. Write your first link and select the Blending Options. We are going to add some “Drop Shadow” to it like this:

Now your text should look like this:

Do the same with all the other links except for the hover one:

Now let’s create the hover one. Use the same font and everything except put the color to white (#ffffff) and add these Blending Options:

Well believe it or not we’re done! If you followed this tutorial carefuly, you should be having something like this:

I hope you liked this tutorial. Feel free to use it in any of your designs but don’t forget to leave a copyright to CoreGFX. You may not redistribute this tutorial without contacting us first. If you have any problems or any questions feel free to contact me on my msn anterrx@hotmail.com

If you want to download the source files, you can do it by clicking the link below.