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I'm trying to create a 'Life Magazine' style link for my Guest Page. I've created the graphics and text to resemble the magazine, but now I'm trying to achieve a 'glossy' look to it. I've added a gradient highlight on the left, and a reflection too...still seems to be missing something though.
Your gradient is not over enough of the page.Try this it works better then gradients most times.Take a photo of the ceiling in your house {no I have not gone mad } and take the image and place it over top of your mag cover and set to softlight or overlay.My reason for doing this is that if the cover is glossy whatever is above the mag is going to be minutely reflected in the cover thus an accurate gloss portrayl.Another good one is a window you could try as well,but using a gradient for gloss is going to be really difficult on a black cover.Gloss is generally contrast related so on black it would be quite difficult.
It's like Stu said; take a second image and blend it in, using a low opacity. This will create some illusion of reflection.
At this moment your gradient is creating the illusion of a bevel.
I added the gradient to the left to try giving the impression of 'roundness' to the folded side of the mag...but, it doesn't seem 'bright' enough and of course, the mag doesn't appear to curve.
My 'reflection' seems to be part of the page, not a reflection on it.
I used a black background for the magazine page thinking 'you can't show light without dark'...I was going for the high contrast a gloss would give.
Thanks to your comments and suggestions, I think the key here is to come up with a different color for the main magazine background. Then I can try using soft light and/or overlay on the blending options.
Back to the drawing boards...will let you know how I fair.
Doc for a black background try screen mode.I use screen for highlights,softlight for midtones and multiply for shadows.For the rounded effect try using a grdient of foreground to transparent,now zoom way in and add just a smidgeo of noise to get rid of the plasticky look,and add just a smidgeon of g blur as well.For the edge of your mag I think white is a bit bright for even that lit are,maybe try blue or mid to dark grey as they will give your color fall off and white is really just pure specular which nature does not throw out very often at all.
First thing I did was to blur the window on the cover to make it recede.
I then made a long thin selection the left edge to just in front of the L in Life.I copied that selection to a new layer.Then in hue and saturation I lifted the lightness to +5,I then copied this layer nudged it back 3 pixels and repeated the process twice more.Now merge all three layers and lift the lightness to +5 again and add a layer mask.Select 50% grey and apply a gradient of foreground to transparent from right to left,but not quite touching the edge of the doc window,leave a little gap.Lift the layers lightness +2 once more,now blur by 8.2 pixels.You should have a nice smudged ink effect at the top left of the page.
Make another new layer and make a selection very similar to our previous one only bring it to 3/4 of the last selection to the outer edge on the right.Drag a gradient from left to right,add noise of 7.3 and reduce the opacity to 60%.You now have a lit magazine edge.
Take a soft brush and make small soft brush strokes like in the images supplied below,we are going to make finger prints.When you are satisfied load the layers selection and turn off the white brush marks layer,select the background layer and copy with the selection active to the top of the layer stack.Increase lightness {hue and sat} +5 once more and there we have greasy smudged finger prints,blur a little if needed.
Make a selection like the panes of a window like in the image below.In the selection on a new layer drag a gradient from top to bottom.You will have a pink area to delete at the top right now,whack it and set the layer to soft light.
In the final image I quickly threw a texture of wood in the background and added a layer style drop shadow to give the mag depth.If you decide to use a drop shadow make your shadow in distance away from the mag the size it is in thickness.The further away you make your shadow the more depth the magazine will retain until it looks like a thick hardback with the shadow moved quite a bit.
The last thing that I added to the image I will let you work out on your own,its very similar to our window but different.The edges could also have more tweaking as well to look real if you wanted.
Thanks bud [righton] .....its aways the small details whch make n image work or not.I think if I spent an another hour or two playing with the background and the mags edges etc I could make it look real,but lghting using gradients makes realistic falloff difficult for a really real world effect
Glossy look 
} and take the image and place it over top of your mag cover and set to softlight or overlay.My reason for doing this is that if the cover is glossy whatever is above the mag is going to be minutely reflected in the cover thus an accurate gloss portrayl.Another good one is a window you could try as well,but using a gradient for gloss is going to be really difficult on a black cover.Gloss is generally contrast related so on black it would be quite difficult.
Great suggestion there Stu! ;\ Hadn't even thought of that simple solution... 
Linear Mode
