How to Create RSS Icon in Photoshop

How to Create RSS Icon in Photoshop Hey everyone and welcome to another Photoshop video tutorial from Robert’s Productions and Photoshop Trainer. Today, I'm going to show you how to create an RSS icon for your blog or for your webpage site, anything. Today, I'm going to be using Photoshop in Vista, my XP machine exploded, not really. I got to fix it this weekend, it’s got a problem, it’s got issues. But anyway, so I'm going to be working on my Vista machine and so I don’t know how good it works with my mic or how the quality is going to be but at least maybe you can understand it. So, let’s get started. The first thing we’re going to do is I'm going to create a new file, File, New. I'm going to set the width to 850 and the height at 750, click OK, probably a good size for your RSS icon is 200x200 because it’s just like a pretty good size. I'm doing it big so you could see it better. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to start off by coming over here to the ellipse tool and we’re going to create a circle on here. So I'm just going to click and drag and you can see I'm making ovals, all kinds of different ovals, shapes. So, since I want a perfect circle, all I have to do is hold on Shift and that will create my perfect circle. I'm going to center it a little bit here. Once I have done that, I'm going to spruce it up a little bit, you like that word “spruce it up”, by double clicking on the Shape 1 layer to open up our layer styles. And I'm going to add an outer glow, I think, an outer glow. So I'm going to check this outer glow box. I'm going to set the color to a light blue color. That’s good enough. Click OK. The blend mode to normal, the opacity at 100, I had a mind freeze. That’s one of the advantages of Vista. Isn’t that exciting? Okay and for the spread, 60 and the size at 3, 50 and 0, now, a color overlay. Color overlay, color overlay, another light blue color, good enough, opacity 100%, good, yes, Okay and what else? A stroke and that color, you know blue again, nothing but blue. It’s my favorite color. Okay blue and the size at one pixel, position outside, blend mode normal, blah-blah-blah, ya, ya, ya, okay. I hate people who say that, so sorry. And click OK. So now, next thing, we’re going to create kind of a highlight to this circle, and to do that, we’re going to have to duplicate our shape one layer, so I'm going to hit Control-J to duplicate it. You could also right click and hit Duplicate Layer but you know, Control-J is a little bit faster. And so once you’ve done that, you’re going to make sure your vector mask thumbnail is highlighted. Yes, make sure it’s highlighted. And then I'm going to go over to the pen tool, pen tool right here and up here we’re going to select the intercept shape areas. And once we’ve done that, we’re going to create kind of a Pepsi style wave, I have no clue. I don’t sit there and stare at the Pepsi cans. So I guess it’s kind of like a wave. So I'm just going to create one from here, hold Shift, create a straight line and right across, I'm going to put another dot right here on the line. Now I'm going to hold on Control and drag that dot up, that mark up, put another one here, hold control, bring that down and that’s close enough to a Pepsi sign, I guess. And then I'm going to close this off from here, back to where I began to close off the pen tool thing. And then, after that, I'm going to work with the blending options of the shape one, so I'm going to double-click, open up layer styles and as soon as you open it, you get the fill opacity. Actually, the first thing we’re doing we’re going to uncheck all of these effects. In our fill opacity, we’re going to bring it down to zero. And we’re going to add a gradient overlay, white to transparent, click OK and everything here should be good and the blend mode to soft white, there we go and now we’re done, so click OK. Now that we’ve done that, we’re going to add our RSS icon. So we’re going to head over to our custom shape tool, it’s custom shape tool, come over here. If you don’t have all of your shapes here, click on this arrow on the upper right hand corner and go to All, click OK and that should bring up all of your shapes. You’re going to find the bull’s eye shape which is right here and if you hold your mouse on top of it, it will say bull’s eye. So then we’re going to click on that and then we’re going to hold on Shift, make a nice big bull’s eye here and we’re going to try to center it, oh boy! That’s exciting, huh? Don’t do that. Create a new layer, get your bull’s eye and then center it off. And actually, we’re going to put the bull’s eye in between the highlight layer and the background layer, just like that. Then, we’re going to add some blending modes, blending styles to layer styles to this bull’s eye shape. So, I'm just going to double-click. I'm going to go down to gradient overlay. For the gradient overlay, I'm going to select a color from kind of a grayish color to white, click OK. And everything stays the same and the blend mode to normal. Now, click OK. Make sure the vector mask is selected for the shape and now we’re going to transform this bull’s eye into an RSS icon. So we’re going to go back to the pen tool. This time we’re going to choose subtract from shape area, so this button right here. And we’re going to cut up the RSS icon, so I'm just going to click here, here, all around here and maybe here and here, here, here, here, and done. And just hit Enter. And now we cut out our RSS icon from the bull’s eye, which is pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah now we’re finished. Now we have our RSS icon. There you go. You can scale it, move it into place, put it on your website, whatever you want. So here I need you to please rate, comment and subscribe. I hope this tutorial helped and thank you for watching and until next time, take care.