Welcome to the Photoshop Training Channel.
I have another great tutorial for you, guys.
Today, we're going to be creating this cool chrome 3D text using Image Based Lights in
Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended.
We'll start by adding our background image.
Then, we're going to create a text layer and make a 3D object out of it.
We are, then, going to add an image based light and change its shape presets to finalize
a chrome effect.
For this tutorial, you must use Photoshop CS6 Extended, which gives you the ability
to create 3D graphics.
If you do not see the 3D option on your Menu bar, you won't be able to follow along.
Photoshop CS5 Extended does have 3D capabilities and can create image based lights, but the
interface is very different and could get confusing if you do not have much experience
with 3D.
But, anyway, let's get started.
The first step is to open up an image.
I'm going to press Ctrl O on the keyboard, that's Command O on the Mac, to open up an
image, and I'm going to select this file here.
This is actually a picture that I took while standing in the middle of the street.
This is actually the street that I lived on in the San Francisco bay area in beautiful
California.
You can use this image if you like or you can use your own.
If you want to use this image, you can download it from my website PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
Search for this tutorial and there will be a link to this image right below the video.
Then, I'm going to press the T key on the keyboard to bring up my Text Tool, and I'm
going to change the color to black.
And I'm going to type the word "Chrome."
I'm going to click on the check mark here to accept those changes.
Press Ctrl T on the keyboard to Transform; that's Command T on the Mac, and I'm going
to increase the size of the text, and place it where I want it to sit on the street.
I'm going to change the font to Arial Rounded.
I'm going to accept those changes, and press the V key on the keyboard to move it around
and I'll place it here.
That's looking pretty good.
Next, we're going to make this into a 3D Layer, and once again, if you do not have Photoshop
CS6 Extended, you won't be able to follow along, so you must have Photoshop CS6 Extended.
Then click on 3D and New 3D Extrusion from Selected Layer, and that's going to turn my
text layer into a 3D layer.
And it's always a good idea to save constantly while you're working in Photoshop, so I'm
going to save my file now.
Okay.
So, now, we're on Photoshop CS6 3D view, and from here, we can manipulate our 3D layer.
But, before we go any further, it's going to be very important that you have your 3D
panel and your Properties panel to follow along this tutorial.
The best way to get to those is by clicking on Window, Workspace and 3D, or you can simply
click on Properties to make sure you have a check next to it, and the same thing for
3D.
So, then, my image actually lines up pretty good with the street, here.
Notice that the ground plane here lines up perfectly with the street, and there's a horizon
line, right here.
This gray line is a horizon line, which is matching perfectly with my image.
If you're using a different image and it doesn't line up as good, using any of these 3D Tools
here and come to the bottom left.
In the bottom left, you see this square, here, with a blue, green, and red arrows, and then,
you can Click and Drag and move your scene around so it matches your picture.
Mine match pretty good so I don't need to make any changes.
So, I'm just going to leave that where it was.
Now, if you've never used Photoshop's 3D feature, every time you're in the 3D feature, and you
click on your Move Tool, it's going to enable all the 3D options.
If I press M on the keyboard for my Marquee Tool, it's going to get rid of all of that.
So I'm going to press V once again to bring everything back, and then, I'm going to come
to the right here to my 3D panel and click on my 3D Text layer titled Chrome.
And, from here, I can change the Extrusion Depth of my 3D text, and notice that I can
push it back or bring it forward as much as I want, and I'm just going to keep that somewhere
around 108 will work fine for this tutorial.
Also, in Photoshop CS6, you have 3D shadows, and you can kind of see those 3D shadows hiding
right behind the text.
But we can control the infinite light, which is this light here, and by clicking on it,
you'll get this tool, here, that we can use to Click and Drag.
And as we Click and Drag, you can see the shadow behind the text changing as we move
the light.
Notice that in our picture, the light source is coming from the left, which means our shadows
are going to the right.
So let's try to match the shadows to the shadows on the picture.
Somewhere around there, I would say.
I'm going to press M on my keyboard, to get rid of the 3D Tools, so we can see it better,
and the shadow is here.
And that's looking pretty good.
Now, I'm going to press V once again to bring my 3D options back up.
To create the chrome effect, we need to give this scene more light.
But we're not going to be creating any more 3D lights.
What we're going to use is an image to apply lighting to our text, and that's actually
called an Image based light—an IBL.
Make sure that you have a check mark next to IBL, click on the folder icon, and click
on Load Texture.
And I'm going to click on the same image that we're currently using as our background.
I'm going to press Open, and notice that when we do, we get this overlay right across the
entire canvass, which represents the image based light.
Now, nothing has happened to our text.
It, still, looks the same.
That's because, by default, Reflections is set to 0%.
So, why don't we go ahead and change that?
Right under our Chrome text layer, you have these different sections that make up our
3D Object.
So, if I click on any one of these, you'll see that a different section of my 3D text
lights up.
So, in this case, the Front Inflation is what's selected, and you can see it because it's
darker than the rest of the text.
Once I click on this in my Properties, you'll see that Reflection is set to zero.
So, I could just Click and Drag that all the way to 100 and, immediately, you see the reflection
of the image based light reflecting on the text.
I need to do the same for all the other sections, but I don't have to do them one at a time.
I can click on the top one, hold Shift on my keyboard and click on the bottom one, and
Click and Drag on Reflection to make those changes to all the sections.
Once you do that, you can press M on your keyboard to get rid of all the 3D Tools, and
you can see that it's already looking much better.
But, just like with any other 3D program, you need to Render your image so things look
smoother, sharper, and the reflections actually show up.
So what you need to do is click on this little icon right here, which is Photoshop's rendering
engine.
I'm going to click on that and it's going to render my scene.
Now, this could take a while, depending on your computer and the complexity of your composition.
So, for now, I'm just going to go ahead and click anywhere on my canvass to stop the render.
And you can stop the render by clicking anywhere within Photoshop or pressing any key on your
keyboard.
And, as I was saying, it takes a while for things to render, depending on your composition.
But there are a few things you can do to speed up the process.
First of all, we're working with Photoshop in 3D.
I recommend lowering the quality settings of your Rendering Options.
That way, things speed up a little bit and you can see the results much quicker.
To do that, you need to go to Edit, Preferences, 3D, and change the quality threshold to something
like 3 or 2.
I'll leave mine at 3.
My computer can handle that just fine.
But play around with those and see what works for you.
Press OK when you're done.
Click on the Render button once again and you'll see that this little blue square is
going to move just a little bit faster.
And when it's done, you might still see some jagged edges or some noise, and that's because
the quality was set to 3, as opposed to 8, as we had it before.
It's going to save us some time while we're working on this composition.
Another tip that I have for you while working on 3D Layers is, while you have your Marquee
Tool, you can press M on your keyboard, if you don't have that selected already, and
you can Click and Drag on any section of your composition, and I'll Click and Drag around
these two letters, and then, click on Render, and Photoshop will only render that section
you selected.
So that could be very useful if you just to see, for example.
In this case, how the shadows are going to look.
So, I'm going to just render the shadows now and kind of give an idea of how they're going
to look.
And that's another really useful trick for you, for when you're using 3D.
Anyway, back to our 3D text.
It's really not looking like chrome.
It's looking like some sort of metal.
It is catching some reflections, but it's still not looking like chrome.
So, to change that, I'm going to click on my chrome 3D text layer once again.
I'm going to click on Shape Presets and click on this icon right here—Inflate.
And look at that.
As soon as we click this, here, our text immediately starts looking like chrome.
I'm going to do a quick render of the entire section, here, so you could see what that
looks like when it's rendered.
Okay, there it is.
It's looking a lot like chrome, and this is the effect that we were going for.
And notice how in this image, you can kind of see the trees, and, maybe, you can make
out a car, too, in the reflections.
It's looking pretty good, but the cool thing about image based lights is that we have control
over what section of the image gets reflected on to our text.
And let me show you how to do that.
I'm just going to press the V key on my keyboard.
I'm going to click on environment and you'll see the image overlay, and you'll see this
circle with the image wrapped around it.
You can Click and Drag that circle, and as I do so, the reflections on my text changes
according to the section of the image that is visible, so, something like so.
There's a lot of green because—I'm going to press the M key to see the regular view—because
there's trees all over the street, so if this texts are real, I know that a lot of trees
will be reflected.
So, something like that looks pretty good.
I'm going to go ahead and just render that section right there.
Okay, that's looking really good.
I'm going to go ahead and let you play it around with your image.
Move it around and get it to a section that you're happy with.
For this tutorial, this is going to be fine.
There are a few things I want to show you before we conclude this tutorial.
One of those things is that these 3D elements can interact with each other.
What that means is that the reflection of one letter can be casted in another and the
same thing with shadows.
So I'm going to move the text around a little bit so you can see how that works.
I'm going to click on the 3D text layer, then I'm going to click on my 3D Options, and then,
click on Split Extrusion.
Press OK.
Once we do that, each individual letter is broken up from the entire text layer.
And you can see that here, when I click on chrome, notice how there's no longer a chrome
layer.
Now, there are different layers, C-H-R-O-M-E.
And we can move each letter individually.
So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to quickly move all these letters around, just
so you can kind of get an idea of how that works.
So, I'm just going to click on the letter "C" here, and then, push that forward just
a little bit.
And notice as I'm pushing it forward, there's a shadow being casted on all the other letters
and that's what I was talking about.
These elements interact with each other with their lights and the reflections.
So I'm just going to quickly move these around, so try to get something nice, here.
Maybe I'll rotate this "R" here so it kind of leans in on the edge of the "H" here.
And be careful when you're moving this around because if I go too far, they just kind of
go through each other and, obviously, if these were real, things wouldn't go through each
other.
So I'll leave that there, and just for fun, I'll move this one, too.
And I don't know, maybe that one's on its side; maybe that one fell over.
And, again, this is just for fun.
I really didn't think about this for the tutorial.
I just thought about it as we were working.
So I figured I would show you.
Anyway, I'm going to press Enter and press M on my keyboard, and I'm going to render
this right here.
Okay, this is looking really good.
You can see the shadows and the reflections on the R and the H. You can kind of see it
on the E that's on the ground here.
But I think it's looking really good.
You can see the reflections of the trees.
You can see some blue here.
This could be the sky.
I mean, things are looking really good.
You can kind of see the reflection of a car here.
And it's safe to assume that there'll be some cars parked, you know, right off camera, here,
so that's looking really good.
One other thing you might want to try with your image is once you're done with everything
else, you can come back into your layers and you can, actually, add layers in-between your
3D layer and your background.
So, I'm going to go ahead and add a layer right between those two.
I'm going to grab on my Brush Tool.
You can click on the Brush Tool.
You can press B on your keyboard.
Now, usually, while I'm doing my tutorials, I tell people to use the bracket keys to make
things smaller or bigger, and that's because most people don't have Photoshop CS6.
But since we're doing a Photoshop CS6 tutorial, I'm going to tell you to hold Alt on your
keyboard, which is Option on the Mac, right click and drag up to make your brush softer
or drag down to make your brush harder.
Drag to the left to make smaller, and drag to the right to make bigger.
Isn't that cool?
So I drag up for a softer brush, and left and right to make it smaller and bigger.
Once you have a soft brush, you can come into your text layer and paint with black just
right under the text.
And I'm going to be really sloppy for now, and I'll show you why in a moment.
I'm going to click on Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and blur that just a little bit.
Then, go to Filter, Blur, Motion Blur, and you know, something small.
I don't want it to be too big, just something that's kind of blurry on the sides there,
and that works.
What I can do now is I can Ctrl Click on my Chrome layer and it's going to select every
visible pixel, and I'm going to create a Layer Mask.
I'm going to click on V on the keyboard to move it down just a little bit, and you can
see the shadows are starting to come out right below my text layer.
So it makes things look just a little more realistic.
Some of the shadows, I noticed, are too harsh, and you can do two things.
You can bring down the Opacity and see if that works, or you can just use your Brush
Tool again, and paint out the things that don't really work out for you, using black
on your Layer Mask.
Oh, and by the way, there's one thing that I almost forgot to show you that is actually
pretty important.
So, we're going to double click on our chrome 3D layer to open it up and we're going to
click on Environment, and we can actually edit our image based light.
Just click on the folder and then, click on Edit Texture.
And this is our image based light texture.
If you darken this up by creating a new curves layer, for example, you'll see the changes
when we go back onto our 3D, and I have to press OK.
And you see how this changed my 3D text.
I'm going to go back, and I'm just going to bring that up a little bit.
If I come back, you see those changes.
So, you can come back into your 3D texture and you can make changes accordingly, and
see if those changes affect your 3D text in a positive way.
So I'm just going to do a quick render to see how that changed my 3D text.
Okay, well, that's not looking too bad.
Anyway, that's the last thing I wanted to show you.
That's it for this tutorial.
As always, I hope you enjoyed watching this tutorial and I hope you learned something
from it.
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