How to: icon carved out of wood

[delphine]

Hi everyone!

I'm polling the forum for your best guess on the effects used to get this fantastic button. I want to create an entire set of icons for my dock and customize all my program icons to look exactly like this one.

I found a tutorial online at alfoart for extremely glossy and shiny text effect but it's for a glossy 3-D effect and this is a cut-out with shadows. I would be grateful for any layer, brush, overlay tips you can give me in my quest!

 

[ibis]

open your button shape layer,
open wood texture layer and drag it over the shape layer,
go back to shape layer make convenient selection of the shape
now move to the texture layer hit ctrl+j
close or delete all other layers
goto filter bevel and emboss do the beveling
goto layer style choose drop shadow that suits you.
ctr+s

 

[delphine]

Hi Ibis! Thanks for your steps. I'm trying them out and will post my results in a few days. Cheers!

 

[delphine]

So this is as far as I got. I can't figure out how to get the light reflections on the parts I highlighted in green. And how do I shave off the extra grey around the button leaving the slight shadow as in the original image above?

Thanks again!

 

[ibis]

for the gray color just put one white filled layer bellow
prior to beveling you need to cut out the f letter
than hold ctrl+left click on the layer icon in the layers palette to select it with shape cutout
like here
View attachment facebook button_question.psd
you may use plugins to get more beveling control such as alienskin

 

[delphine]

Wow. Ok, I don't know how to do any of that. I will research this and work on it. Thank you Ibis! (I'm really impressed with the button you created, I hope to be able to do the same myself in a few weeks)