Photoshop Tutorials -- Soft Bevelled Text with Alien Skin's Black Box plugins |
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Creating Soft-Bevelled Text with Photoshop and Alienskin's Black Box
This tutorial will show you how to create soft bevelled, or quilted, text. I used PhotoShop 3.04 for Windows. Some things may be done differently with other versions. I also used Alien Skin's Black Box 2.0 plugin filters.
I'd like to thank Alien Skin for their support of this web site.
Start off by opening a new file. I opened one at 400x200 and left the background white.
NOTE: The file will be shown at 200x100 here to save download time :)
Set the default foreground/background colors by clicking the small black and white squares below the color swatch in the tool palette. Now reverse them by clicking the curved two-headed arrow. This will leave the foreground/background as white and black, respectively.
Use the text tool to enter some text. I entered my name, Mike, in Tiffany HV BT at 120 pixels. I set bold and anti-aliasing ON. If you don't have this font choose something kind of chunky that looks similar to what I've chosen. Center the text using CTRL-X and CTRL-V (see figure 4.1).
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| figure 4.1 |
NOTE: Through all of these steps DO NOT de-select the text.
Choose Filters, Alien Skin, Inner Bevel 2.0 and select the "Button" setting. Your image should resemble figure 4.2
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| figure 4.2 |
Blur the text using Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur set at 3.0 to get something similar to figure 4.3.
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| figure 4.3 |
Set the foreground color to a light to medium gray by using the eyedropper tool  to select a color from somewhere in the text.
Expand the selection using Selection, Modify, Expand with a setting of 3 pixels.
Choose Edit, Stroke and use 2 pixels, and "Inside", for the settings. This will leave a gray outline around the letters as in figure 4.4.
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| figure 4.4 |
Now we'll finish up by adding a drop shadow. Choose Filters, Alien Skin, Drop Shadow 2.0 and use the typical setting. This will give us the finished graphic, shown here at 400x200 (see figure 4.5).
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| figure 4.5 |
Kind of reminds me of that (don't squeeze the...) paper towel T.V. ad.
That's it.... Be sure to check out some of our other Photoshop tutorials or take a look at our new Photoshop Quick Tip Videos.
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