Glossy/plastic/glass effect in graphics

Hey guys.

I've spent about a week looking for a tutorial on adding a plastic/glass effect to a button/anything. You see them everywhere but I need a lot of custom ones that are all the same.

The source of this quote is from PC WORLD and it was in their 4 sentence introduction to a downloads page for various CG programs, like The Gimp.

Does anyone know of a good/any tutorial that can show me how to do this or how to get started? I even spent time trying to figure it out on my own playing with filters and such. I ended up getting one semi-almost-decent effect, it looked like frost on a window.

I found everything from taking "red eye" out of a dog to using bumpmapping to make plasma look like painters canvas, then you paint on it :P Well in between.

edit
Well that quote helped me a lot! I didn't know I was looking for a refraction effect so I searched on it and found a plug-in for the gimp that will do what I want I think.

Here is a link to the page that has all the info.

http://gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net/refract/home.php

It's a plug-in and not a script and I don't know how to add anything to the gimp so I'm working on this.

Solutions only lead to more problems...

I can find a lot of information on writing a plug-in for the gimp, none for installing one :S.

I need a win32 binary and not a linux source file. :S yay

Don't forget about CSS. It can do pretty neat things with transparency if you take the time to set it up. That way, you don't have to modify your images, just set them up with style sheets. If your style sheet changes, then all of your transparencies will too. This is quicker than modifying 10 graphic files.

This might help. Gimp Users Group

eyesondesign.com has some nice tutorials. They are for photoshop, but if you understand GIMP, you should be able to translate it.