embossing and textures

markup-master.blogspot.com/2008/01/bittorrent-userbar-database.html

do you see how all these look glossed over? or shiny? it makes them look a lot more attractive, and after playing around with things it looks like this is called "embossing".

anyway, im wondering if im right about this, that embossing can make it look glazed over like that. im also wondering where i can find more"textures' for my embossing options. right now i only see one that looks like bubbles and an exploding rainbow.

thank you =)

Most of the gloss texture is actually done with shading and transparency. For example, see the "Acid Lounge" how there is a curved line of lighter color? That's done by creating a curved shape with a white fill, setting the transparency to a lower level, and changing the blend method to "screen".

Sorry it's a terrible description, but there's a wonderful tutorial on making glassy buttons in Illustrator. The concept of adding glare is the same in Photoshop.

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/resources/tutorials/glassy-button/

Hope that helps a little.