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I usually start my columns
with a light-hearted lead in before I begin the tutorial, but as
you have probably noticed I've deferred from this approach for
the last few weeks. Quite frankly I'm still in shock over the
events that have occurred since the morning hours of September
11. It has been my sincere hope that none of you have suffered
personal loss due to the acts of these murderous cowards, but
from email I've received I know that this hope is vane. Some of
you have suffered directly. It has been a real eye opener for
this Montana guy; though I live isolated in the mountains in a
state with less than a million population, still I know people
who suffered great loss from the attacks. My thoughts go with
you, and I pray for swift, decisive and terrible judgment on
these cowards who would dare harm my friends and family for
whatever cause. They are a twisted minority, and I've no doubt
that their end will be far worse than the terror they seek to
spread. I think I'm done venting now.
That being said, let's dive into a cool effect.
We've sort of touched on this before, but I'm in the mood for
something 'groovy' to lift the tension. Layer Styles can take
you a long way these days, but for combining effects (adding
metal to glass, for instance) you need to work with more than a
single layer. You will also want to work with some filter
options for added texture. All the steps I'm taking here are
actionable, I'm including the action with this column for you to
enjoy. Let's get started!
1) Make a new image. Background doesn't matter,
but you may want to go with white or transparent. Mine is a
transparent image, 100 DPI, RGB.
2) Create a new layer.
3) Choose the Type Mask Tool, and enter your text in the new
layer with a font size of at least 120. For this example I'm
using 'PizzaDude Pointers', found at
http://www.pizzadude.dk/home.html . If you've never visited
this site I strongly recommend it, especially if you are into
original fonts.
4) Fill the selection with a color; white should
work just fine.
5) Create a new layer.
6) Choose Gray as your foreground color. Go to Edit>Stroke.
Apply a centered 6 pixel stroke.
Here's the example thus far:
7) Since we are already on the stroked layer,
let's work with that guy first. Command/CTRL+Click the stoke
layer in the layers palette to make our stroke an active
selection. Let's duplicate this layer just in case.
8) Hit 'D' to reset your colors. We don't really want a stark
black foreground, so let's change that to an extremely dark
blue/black. We just need a hint of color, so don't get too
bright!
9) Select the gradient tool. We want to go Foreground to
Background, Refelected Gradient Style, fill mode set to
Difference.
10) Start filling the selection several times
from different angles.
11) Let's add a bit of noise to the selection:
12) Now just a little bevel to give us some
dimension and reflection:
Let's move down to the filled layer and work on
the gloss. What gloss? You'll soon see!
13) With the filled layer selected (as opposed
to the stroke layers), open the Layer Style dialog box. Choose
'Blending Options' from the top of the left hand menu. We will
change a couple settings here:
14) For the next few steps, we will just walk
through Layer Style Settings:
First some Color:
A Bevel:
Inner Shadow:
Inner Glow:
And finally, a Gradient Overlay:
That seems like a lot of steps, which is why you
should save this as a Layer Style if you would like to apply it
again in the future. After all that, here is the result:
I threw a bit of background in to show that the
glass is, indeed, somewhat transparent.
Let's run the action I created on some other
text, just to make sure everything works:
Looks like everything is in order! Thanks for
taking a few minutes out of your week to spend with me, and
please come see me at Action Fx. Take Care! |