Many beautiful gemlike or glasslike presets can be created with the button designer any shape engine that will rival Eye Candy's glass or Blade pro's shiny presets. I'm going to endeavor here to show you how to create your own presets for the button designer. Create a path shape that is 2d and white. You can use any shape you like for this. The shape you choose will show in the thumbnails for your preset.

Go to web/ button designer/ any shape. You will see a plain beveled button in the preview. As normal, you can pick the bevel type and the width and light direction for your preset. I think this part of the button designer has been well explored in previous tutorials. At this point however, you may not be able to see the button well enough (since it is white) to look at the different effects of different bevels. So click directly on the light tab.

The light tab is where you can add different colors to your preset, making your gem preset come alive. You can add up to four lights here. Let's start out by clicking on the little white square beside light color. When you left click that square, you get the ulead color picker. However, you can right click for more choices if you prefer the windows color picker, or even an on screen color. So choose a color other than white for your color. I've chosen a purple one. After you chose your color the screen will refresh to show your shape as it will look with the one color applied. Already, we have a nice lavender colored, shiny button. The color is more lustrous than it would be if you were simply adding a bevel to a lavender colored button. The light value, (the slider above light color) adjusts the  strength of the light of the color you choose here. For now, keep it the same for each new color. Playing with the light values for each light you add will change the overall color of your preset. It will also serve to brighten the light shining on your button, and may wash out your colors if it is too high.

Each light has it's own color and it's own settings. Add another light by pressing the up arrow beside lights, and then click on the second light. (In this example, only one light is active, so the second light is grayed out. When you add a light you will see it become active and available.) Now adjust the settings for this light as you did for the first one. Notice if you choose a different color light here your button takes on a different color with two different colors of lights. So choose a pleasing color that will coordinate well with your first color. You may have to play around here to get something that pleases you. The light value of each light is separate. A low number here will mean that that color will not be a predominant one in your gem preset, while a higher number will give that color more weight.

As you add lights to your preset, you will notice that the light color gets brighter and brighter. Therefore, you will have to decrease the highlight setting each time you add a new light. The highlight setting applies to all of the lights, and the least number you can choose is -100. I found that -100 was a good setting when I had added four lights. This may be higher if your light value was different than the ones I used. I continued adding lights until I had four, and ended up with this button (on the right). This is the optinal preset downloadable above. I encourage you to download it to explore the settings. You may even use this preset as a template, changing the bevel style and the light colors to create any number of presets.

Now that you have your light settings in place it is time to add an interesting bevel. The bevel can make a big difference to your preset. Choose your bevel in the bevel type section. Here you are shown a thumbnail of the bevel outline. Choose one with ridges, and then change the repeat number to add more rings of bevels. The shape and size of your original image will determine how the bevels look, so you may want to get in the habit of right clicking on your presets and clicking modify properties and apply to fine tune this aspect of your preset when using them. When you are satisfied with your preset, click the add button to add it to your own gallery. I hope this has explained a bit of the mysteries of the button designer, and will give you a starting point in designing your own presets.

Eye candy glass has nothing over pi's button designer, any shape engine. Look at the frame effect on the left. If you wish, you can add a texture to your finished object through the texturizer plugin, or use pi's own built in texturizer available through the creative painting engine. When using button designer presets, remember that they will change path items automatically to image items, and that they build on top of each other, they do not replace the previous one. Combining presets can get you some beautiful effects, but remember that too many presets combined will add so much color that you will be left with a totally black object. When combining presets it s a good idea to only apply two at a time at the most, using the undo button to remove a preset if you don't care for the result. Buttton designer presets are not just for buttons. They can be applied to any shape made with the path tool as well as regular image objects. The make excellent frames as well! Use them on a flower or butterfly to make a decorative brooch, or use them to make gems to adorn your projects. They also can give text a glass or gem effect.