Alien Skin Software - Eye Candy 6 -Chrome Effect and Perspective Shadow

Part 1. Create your background and text.

Ok, So recently I did a demo at our meeting (well actually it was more than two months ago, but who is counting) about light and shade and establishing depth perception via design in Photoshop. Well, afterwards everyone said they would like to see that demo on the website, so here goes. Similar demo, different content, plus a couple of uses of my favorite plug-ins from Alien Skin Softwares: Eye Candy 6. Additionally, I will be doing this with CS5 as opposed to CS3.

1.       Create a standard PhotoShop sized canvas measuring 5 x 7.

2.       Double-click the Background layer to unlock and rename it.

a.       In the New Layer dialog box enter Gradient background for the name.

b.      Choose an identifying color for your layer if you desire.

c.       Make sure the Mode is set to Normal, and the Opacity is set to 100%.

d.      Click OK.

3.       With the Gradient tool, Apply a diagonal gradient fill to the background. Use light gray to dark gray.

To do this easily:

a.       Press D on your keyboard to set your colors to the default Black and White.

b.      Press X to swap them.

c.       Click the Gradient button .

 

d.      At the top of your screen, on the Gradient toolbar, Make sure Foreground to Background gradient is selected.

e.      Use a linear gradient style.

f.        With your mouse, click outside of the top-left corner of the canvas and drag down to the bottom-right.

g.       Your result should look like this:

Now, the effect I am looking for will only look good if the font we are using is particularly thick. There are some conventions to make a font thicker in Photoshop, but I believe it is easiest to do this in Illustrator.

4.       Open up Illustrator and create a document the same size as your Photoshop document.

5.       Add some text. In this case I used the standard DMAG font which originates from Neuropol. You can find a free version of this font at 1001fonts.com

To do this easily:

a.       Click the text tool, and add some text.

b.      With your text highlighted, press CTRL + > on your keyboard to increase your font size. Keep your text positioned near the upper-middle portion of your canvas. Make sure you leave enough room for a reflection under your text.

c.       If you see that your font is not "thick enough",  then press CTRL + SHIFT + O on your keyboard to create outlines of your text.

d.      Now navigate to Object > Path > Offset path and enter 3 or 4 in the Offset box.

e.      If your letters now seem crowded, with the text selected, press CTRL+SHIFT+G on your keyboard to ungroup them. Space your letters out accordingly to your taste.

f.        Select all the letters and press CTRL + C to copy them.

g.       Return to Photoshop and navigate to Edit > Paste to open up the paste options dialog box.

h.      In the Paste dialog box, select Smart Object and click OK.

i.         In Photoshop Resize your text so that it is situated in the upper middle of your canvas.

NOTE: Make sure you leave room for the reflection.

Alien Skin's - Eye Candy 6 - Chrome effect and virtual 3d.

Now that we have our text inside of Photoshop we will apply the Alien Skin Eye Candy Chrome effect.  If you do not have Eye Candy 6 , you can download a Trial version at: http://www.alienskin.com/downloads/ Eye Candy 6 includes a multitude of one-click to beautiful effects that seldom need any tweaking. Of course I am just lazy. Here are some preview renditions of the Chrome effect in action

Although I could always use more gold, I am going to stick with that o' so sexy chrome. This effect works nicely because our background gradient is light in the top right, as is this effect.

Now, if we wanted to create a perspective shadow for this text, Eye Candy 6 has a great Perspective shadow tool. Perspective shadow gives you far greater opportunity to manipulate your shadows than Photoshop alone so that you don't have to Cowboy it like in the above steps.

Here are two examples of Eye Candy shadow effects inside of their very tweakable interface.

11.   Now create a new layer above all the other layers, hold down Ctrl and click the main text layer to select its pixels and back on your new layer fill the selection with White.

12.   Making sure that you have a selection tool selected (not the move tool) move the selection down 1 pixel, and right one pixel.

13.   Press delete to delete the White that is encompassed by the selection tool and leave just a fringe of white around the edges. This effect helps you achieve a greater perception of 3d.

Creating the reflective surface and streams of light

So far things are looking pretty fresh. And, if we were looking for bland, we would stop here. However, let's carry on and see how else we can tweak this work with a reflective surface.

1.       Select the Gradient background layer and press CTRL + J on your keyboard to jump the layer. (Make a duplicate)

2.       Double click on the name of the new layer and name it Reflective surface.

3.       Press V on your keyboard to select the Move tool and move the layer down about ¾ of the canvas size.

4.       Select your Chrome (text) layer. Press CTRL + J to jump it to a new layer.

5.       Rename the new layer Reflective Chrome.

6.       Right-click the layer and select Rasterize layer.

NOTE: When working with smart layers, and then transforming them, the effects do not always carry over into a transformed version. Rasterizing the layer merely locks in all effects up to that point and merges them into the layer. If we had not been working in smart objects, you would not have to do this.

7.       Select the Reflective Chrome layer and press CTRL + T on your keyboard to create a free transform box around the text.

8.       Grab the top-center transform handle and drag the text down to create a reversal.

9.       Move the lower text into a position so that it is almost touching the upper text.

Now this would be good if the text were standing on top of a mirrored table. However, the effect works better if you provide some "table" and light realism.

10.   On the Reflective chrome layer, click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette.

11.   Select the Gradient tool.

12.   Using the Foreground (black) to transparent gradient, start at the top (their true top had they not been flipped) of the reflected letters and drag towards the bottom of the letters. This should cause the tops of the letters to fade away while the bottoms to remain the same.

13.   Create new layer named Light at the top of all layers.

14.   Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and draw out four marquees across the canvas that increase in size.

15.   Press CTRL + Backspace to fill with white (As long as White is your background color).

16.   With the "light" still selected, press CTRL + T to transform the object. Rotate the object diagonally to where the light source is coming from. (upper right)

17.   With the transform box still active, right click the "light" and from the context dialog box select distort.

18.   Click on the upper control handles and pull them in, then click on the lower control handles and pull them out to make the "light" look like a fan.

19.   Set the layer to Overlay, and 20% Opacity and then navigate to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and give it a blur radius of 6px.

Once again this looks pretty good, but wouldn't it be nice if the highlighting white area we created earlier only showed up where light was hitting it? Additionally, the light appears to be coming from behind the text, therefore the text should not be brighter where the light streaks go across it. To alleviate this dilemma, perform the following steps.

1.       To do this, Ctrl-click the light layer and then click on the white highlight layer to select it.

2.       With the White highlight layer selected, click on the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette.

3.       Press CTRL + D to deselect the object.

4.       CTRL -click the Chrome text layer to make a selection of the text area.

5.       Press CTRL + SHIFT + I on your keyboard to invert your select.

6.       Select the Light rays layer and click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette.

Adding color to it all

Normally I would leave well enough alone, but this steely gray is getting to me, and I am feeling punchy. So to conclude this tutorial, lets add a little color pizzazz.

1.       Create a new layer at the very top of the layers palette.

2.       Double click your color palette to pick a new foreground color. I choose #07c2b7

3.       Press CTRL + Backspace to fill the layer with the new color.

4.       This covers up everything, but to get it back again, change the layer's blend mode to Color.

You're done!

Here are a couple of renditions of this tutorial.

And my favorite

Hope you enjoyed it and learned something.