Page 1 of 1

Tutorial topic

PostPosted: May 13th, 2011, 12:26 pm
by AlucardX60
Basically this thread is for you to share your knowledge of special effects you've discovered about your beloved art programs.

Things to include:
  • The Program your using
  • Any non-default plug-ins
  • Links to said plug-ins (if available)
  • The type of tutorial (Creation, Text Effect, Distortions and mods., Misc.)

Also use spoilers for your longer tuts. Especially if you use images. And feel free to leave feedback on other peoples tuts.

How to make my avatar. A.K.A. Shynetex {Text effect}: show
Original tut by pdnnoob, but I did not Copy/Paste any of the text or images.

Program/s: Paint.net
Plug-ins: none

1. Start Paint.net or create a new image with the dimensions of 800x600 pixels and bucket fill it black. (Unless you want to use black as a starting text color)
2. Create a new layer. Call it "Glow (All)". Write your text with any font or color. The font size should be no larger then 150, but not smaller then 70. (In this tut I used Black Chancery at a size of 84)
Image
3. Duplicate the layer twice giving you a total of 4 layers. Rename the middle one "Taxt Base" and the top one "Text Highlight".
4. Hide the "Text Highlight" and "Glow (All)" Layers so you can see the "Taxt Base" layer better.
5. Use the median effect (Effects > Noise > Median) at the 50 precentile and so that you can still see every part of the text. (Here I used a 3)
Image
6. Now hide the "Text Base" layer and show the "Text Highlight" layer.
7. Do the same as step 5 but with a 17 percentile.
Image
8. Change the Hue And Saturation (Adjustments > Hue/Saturation...) level to 50 sat. and 70 light.
Image
9. Show the "Text Base" layer and move the "Text Highlight" layer to the upper left corner of the "Text Base" layer.
Image
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now all that's left is for the glow and reflection. You can do this any way you like but if you don't have your own way just copy the below steps
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Glow:
1. Duplicate the "Text Base", and "Text Highlight" layers and rename then "Glow (Base)", and "Glow (Highlight)" respectively.
2. set a gaussian blur (Effects > Blurs > Gaussian blur) of about 5 for both Glows.
3. Do the same for the "Glow (All)" layer but change the hue and saturation to sat. 150 and light -30. Now change the opacity in layer settings to 180.
Image

Reflection:
1. Hide the "Background" layer and select "Save as" save as "Shynetex temp.png". this will flatten the image allowing for you to have the same effect without merging all the layers together (which ruins it). Simply hit undo to re-layer the image
2. open the file "Shynetex temp.png" and use the wand tool to select the fully transparent part. (Basically just click in one of the corners) Change to Rectangle Select and change the selection mode to "Invert ("xor")". Now select over all the selected area thus making the unselected image selected. Copy/Paste it into the main image in a layer right above the background.
3. Select layers > Flip Vertical now move the image below the main image.
Image
4. If you wish, since the image is so large, you can cut off part of the bottom part of the reflection like I did in my avatar.
5. Set a Gaussian blur of about 10.

Finished product:
Image
Feel free to do whatever you like with the "Background" layer. I find it looks nice with gradients.