I'm using Photoshop CC. I've been struggling to figure out the best method to re-create this look to make a shiny fingernail paint like the attached image. If anyone can teach me or point me to the right tutorial, I'd really appreciate it :)
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Sign up to join this communityAppears to me to merely be a Gradient Overlay Layer Style:
If you want to add a touch of highlight to the edge, you could also add an Inner Glow Layer Style:
That... appears to me to be a horizontal linear gradient with three stops, the outer two are the same value and tone (the given red hue shifted towards black by the same amount) and the nearly-centred stop (shifted a few percent to the right from centre) is the same hue angle of red shifted towards white.
Here are the gradient stops prior to applying them to a polygon selection:
Here that is applied to the selection:
Hope that helps!
I do not recommend gradients. You will need many stops in your gradient to get complex enough highlights, if your example shows what's wanted. You can build it with a base color and 2 blurred layers (sorry for my dark and desaturated screenshots, my less than decent system detoriates the screenshots):
The dark edge area is in the bottom. 2 layers with the highlight color is added. In the middle there's a half wide slice and on the top there's more narrow slice.
Blur the mid slice with gaussian blur or more preferably with horizontal only blur if your photoshop version has it.
Blur the narrow slice with smaller radius bur. Adjust the transparencies of the blurred layers to good effect:
That's already mentioned, but you can add a hue&saturation adjustment layer for other colors:
Adjusting only hue isn't enough because in RGB system changing hue changes also apparent lightness and colorfulness. You probably must adjust also lightness and saturation. In Lab color system the parameters are more independent.