Metals in PS
The simplest way I've found to do realistic metal effects is to use any or all of the following PS plugins: "Eyecandy 4000" and Flaming Pear's "SuperBlade Pro."
With a little practice, you can produce sweet metals. One thing I've found to help the metallic appearance effect, is to apply an effect, then go up to the "fade" menu (under edit) reduce the effect to 40-50%, apply a texture, fade the texture, and then re-apply the chrome effect, fade as needed. Also hitting what you're working on with blur effects and twists and swirls is really helpful to give the image/object a real metal feel.
All that being said, most of the pieces you're working on won't be all that huge, so it should go pretty fast.
- chaga
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