This tutorial will teach you step-by-step how to make a cool looking userbar. Note: It is important to enlarge the images to see the details. 1. Open your Photoshop program. 2. Click File > New. Make your image size 350x19 and Color Mode: RGB Color 16 bit. 3. Choose an image to place in your userbar. You might want to rotate it, enlarge, reduce, flip or add any effect to it in order to look spiffy. 4. Now we'll need to create a pattern that will add a diagonal line to the userbar. Create a 6x6 image, zoom a bit and, with the pencil tool, draw a diagonal line like this one below: Then, go to Edit > Define Pattern. Name it. 5. Go back to the userbar image, double-click in the background image layer that you chose, go to Pattern Overlay, choose your recently created pattern. Put the opacity to 60% and the blend mode to Overlay. Your image shall look something like this: 6. Your next step is to add the userbar text. For this, most of people use the Visitor BRK font, as it is cool there. Using the text tool, type whatever you want using the Visitor BRK font, turn off the anti-aliasing, font size 10pt, color white and a 1px black border. Place it in the corner of the image. It shall look something like this: 7. Finally, your last step is to add a 1px black border to the whole image, which you can do it by creating a new layer, paint it black, add a 1px black border inside and turning the border layer fill to 0%. This is my final result: Note that I also add an eliptical white color to the background image, it doesn't need to be done always but sometimes it makes it even cooler. You can also do it by selecting the background image layer, using the eliptical marquee tool and selecting a part of the image with it. Then you need to right-click the selection, then click fill, select white color for it, put the opacity to 40% and click ok. Hope this was useful! +rep would be also appreciated. Over and out.
And to add the shiny effect, you can just create a new layer and use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to trace a selection, then use a white fading gradient tool to add the effect. Change the layer opacity to what you think it's good, and it's done!!!