You’ve all seen the cool websites that have an excellent “depth” feel to the page. Well here’s one technique to achieve this effect.

This is what you will have at the end of this tutorial:

Firstly, open a blank canvas and draw a gradient from top to bottom. I chose dark blue with light at the top and black at the bottom.

Next I drew a rounded corner box and filled that with a similar gradient but using white and grey. I then drew the star (with a pink gradient, drop shadow and inside stroke) with the word NEW (with slight outer glow) in the middle, and any old text you want on the right hand side.

Now here comes the cool bit. Merge all the layers except the background gradient together. Select the merged layer and click “Edit”, “Transform” and then “Perspective”. You will now see 8 little square points around the image. Click on the bottom right corner one, hold your left mouse button and move it up slightly and let go. click the tick to apply it. We now have the first part of the perspective set up.

Now, duplicate that layer and “Edit”, “Transform”, “Flip Vertical”. Now move that layer down so that it is just under the original layer. Now with the duplicated layer selected, click “Edit”, “Transform” and “Distort”. The same 8 points will appear around the image. This time, click and hold the top right one and move it up to just under the original layer. Then click on the bottom right one and move that up slightly until the perspective looks the same as the original layer.

Now change the opacity of the duplicate layer to say 50%, then add a layer mask to fade it out slightly from top to bottom.

Voila, a cool depth perspective feel. You can experiment with different shapes but it works very well with these rectangular shapes.

Let me know how you get on.

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