How to replicate this matte glossy sheet effect in Photoshop?

Question

I'm trying to replicate the matte glossy effect in this image:

This is how far I've got:

This is a screenshot of my attempt / settings:

Answer 1

You should have a photo which contains a slice of glossy pipe or bent sheet metal. It can have a reflection of another parallel curved metal surface or the sheet should have quite complex bending.

The photo can be stretched to the wanted height and darkened to suit for your purposes. Too much stretching isn't good because all imperfections start to look big.

I haven't such photo, but I made a gradient. It's plus side is the possibility to imitate the same apparent bending as the one in your reference image. A photo would be different.

I filled a higher area with the same gradient and inserted a curves layer to darken the gradient. A narrow slice is left with a layer mask undarkened for comparison:

Someone can ask "why all this hassle with metallic shading when one could make the right dark gradient straight from the start?" I must admit I could never get it right without making at first something which looks metallic. Picking the shades from your image was useless due the texture.

I guess a real photo of metal could be even more plausible. It can have also a good texture with no extra effort, but surely it wouldn't be a replica of your example.

Not asked:

A short white writing can easily be inserted as metallic and fitting the apparent light:

Copy a piece of the metallic gradient with a selection and paste it on the top. Put it in the original place and you do not lose the consistency of the light.

One can make a selection with the text by clicking the text icon in the Layers panel and holding the Ctrl key at the same time.

Surface texture is still missing. I try to make one with Photoshop's effects:

• fill a new layer with grey
• insert low contrast noise with Filter > Noise > Add noise, 10%
• apply filter sprayed strokes, vertical
• insert a layer mask which makes the texture thinner at bright areas

The result as is and inserted to the image with blending mode Hard Light:

The layer mask in the texture layer is the original gradient as inverted. Dark end is lifted a little to have a little texture also on bright areas. The layer mask is necessary because full texture on bright areas looks wrong. On real surfaces the sideways light makes the texture visible and there's less sideways light on highlights.

I tried the texture also on the text, but it reduced the readability.

Answer 2

I threw a super-fast answer together in the application I had open, which was Affinity Designer - but the exact same approach would work in either Photoshop or Illustrator.

Linear gradients, with enough stops to allow the necessary variation - one per page.

Black paper texture image over the top, this one set to colour dodge.

Black paper texture image over the top, this one set to glow.

From this start, you can make your faux paper more or less glossy (thus less or more matte) by either adding noise to the gradients or adding noise layer set to an appropriate blend mode - say darken, or multiply or darker colour.

This is an approximated final image:

Hope this helps!

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Coup de grâce touch - not asked for but provided just 'cos!

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Subtle improvements can be made cheaply and easily by adding slight shadows both where the book's pages would shade the underlying cover interior surfaces, and the surface on which the book is laid, and further slight subtle shadows on the pages themselves - and a very slight perspective or envelope warp on the text and logo content on the page (super light touch here) will finish the look; I also added a curves adjustment layer to give a bit more pop to the image overall.

Bonne chance!