This week let’s create an fm tuner in photoshop from scratch. This tutorial shouldn’t take more than an hour and is probably aimed at the intermediate user. I’ll be using brushes, shapes and blends so if you need practice in any of these read on!
1) Start by opening a new document in photoshop. I chose the size 1000 x 379 px. I filled it with a nice black background that sort of resembles a car dashboard from subtlepatterns.com.
2) Next draw a rectangle inside this leaving around 50px padding between the canvas and the rectangle all the way round. Fill it with a nice pattern, mine came from subtlepatterns.com again. Next add a #181818 stroke of 8px. Next draw a rectangle a little bit higher than half the height of the main rectangle and fill with #6f6f6f.
3) Next control click on the mask for the smaller rectangle and add a new layer. Choose a soft brush and create a shadow around the edge of the rectangle to give it some depth.
4) Lets add a white stroke to the bottom of the tuner to give it even more depth. Duplicate the rectangle then lower the fill to 0%. First add a stroke of 3px inside and color #ffffff and then rasterize the layer so we can delete some of the line. Grab the eraser and drop the opacity to about 30-40% making sure the hardness is 0% proceed to erase the whole of the top line and fade the side lines. Lower the opacity to about 50%. After that you’re done with the background for the moment so group it up and lets move on.
5) Next let’s create the lines for the tuner. Add 3 2px lines of the same length and same spacing on the right of the tuner. Then add a rectangle of 80px high at the bottom spanning the whole width of the tuner, this is going to be used in the next part of the tutorial for the knobs.. Make the smaller lines #898989 and the rectangle. Add in all the numbers and “FM Stereo”, I used Helvetica Neue, try a nice sans-serif font to gain the same style
6) Lets then create the red button on the left of the tuner. Create a new layer and using the ellipsis tool draw a small circle. Fill it with red and the give it a stroke of 5px # 7d7d7d outside. Next add bevel and emboss. Choose Inner Bevel, smooth, depth 1000%, direction down, size 6px, soften 5px, angle -90 degress. Highlight opacity 87% and shadow opacity 15%. Add a grainy pattern overlay and reduce the opacity to make it slightly duller.
7) Create a 2px blue line to use for the tune location and place it somewhere nice and balanced.
8 ) Let’s give some gloss to the face of the tuner and then we’re done on that part. Using the pen tool draw a curvy line to opposite corners of the tuner. Make the selection and then using a soft white brush colour the selection from the center. This will give the illusion of a reflection.
9) Save it and then come back next week to see part two where we’ll be adding the knobs to the bottom of the tuner.
