How to Make Glassy Metal Text Effect in Photoshop Tutorial
Hey guys, its Colin Smith here and this week,
I've got two tutorials for you. What I'm going to show you here is to create a text effect
where we're going to put a metal edge around our text and then fill it with this lumpy
glassy kind of a thing. It's kind of fun. I think you're going to enjoy it.
All right, so what we're going to do is because
I've had some people say, "Hey, you got all this photography things you do. You got all
these drone things you do. What about designers?" Don't worry, I haven't forgotten designers.
So this week, I've got a technique just for designers. I'm going to show you how to take
text and add this metallic edge around it, a nice chromey kind of metal, and then, we're
going to put a texture in it, and put a shiny kind of a glassy thing, but we're going to
make the glassy thing kind of a little bit—I don't really know how to say it—just kind
of this weird shape texture. There it is. It looks right there.
So, I think, there's a lot of different things
that you're going to learn from this, and one of the things that you're going to learn,
one of the key things, apart from creating this effect, is how to create a layer style
and actually make that layer style fit any size, because when you add a layer style to
something big, and it was designed for that, it looks great. You edit something small,
it just looks weird like hand me down clothes that you haven't quite grown into you.
So I've got some techniques in here that I'm
going to show you how to adjust and modify any layer style that will work. I'm also going
to give you this pattern and I'm also giving you these two layer styles that I've created
in this tutorial, so just look at the link underneath or the little link up here and
you can download those, and use them for yourself. So without further ado, let's jump in and
do this text effect.
All right, I've just taken a little bit of
a break from writing my drone photography book to get a tutorial up for you guys, and
I'm going to do something different this week that I haven't done in a while. I'm going
to give you this really photo realistic type of type effect. So I'm going to create this
kind of glassy, bubbly, glassy thing with a texture in the background that sits on this
metal kind of a shape. I think you're going to enjoy it.
So what we're going to do is we're going to
create a new document and this one's 1280 by 720, just something to fill up this space
and, you know, it can be any size you want. I'm also going to grab a font here. Let's
go to the Type Tool. And what I'm going to do is to set it like a mid-gray for this.
There we go.
A lot of the time when you do this type of
effects, it's great to start with a gray color because then that way you can use Blend Modes
a lot more freely and just, you know, gives you a little bit more flexibility, so I'm
going to click OK, because I'm actually going to add the color in the layer style. So gray
just is a really great neutral color to start with.
Anyway, I'm using this font here, this is
Abadi, Abadi, something like that, you know, you could use Arial Black, or whatever. Actually,
let's grab the Arial Black. I think I like that one better; just something that's blocky.
And I'm just going to click here and type in. I can see this is way too big. I'm going
to do PHOTOSHOP CAFE as two words. And to select everything, just click in your Type
Tool and hit Ctrl A, that would be Command A on Mac, and you can go here and change the
size of it because that was just humongously way too big.
The leading is way too far apart, so let's
go here and we're just going to change this leading. That's that one there and we just
kind of pull them together a little bit. But before I commit to that, I'm going to go large
with this. So notice the type is still selected, I'm just kind of playing around with it, finding
something I like.
Let's do this. This will be kind of interesting.
And then, I'm going to go back to my leading again and just play around with that. All
right, looks good. Click the Move Tool to apply that and there we go. We got this big
huge blocky thing on here. Now I have a feeling that we might have to change some things here
because the PHOTOSHOP and the CAFE are actually going to be different. So this is great, you're
actually going to learn something new here.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going
to rasterize this real quick. And the reason I'm doing that is just because these are different
sizes and I want to separate them. So I'm just going to select the first part here,
the Photoshop on the top and I'm going to move this to a new layer. So if you hit Ctrl,
Ctrl J or Command J, but add the Shift key, so I'm doing Command Shift J, and that will
be Ctrl Shift J, and what it does is rather than copy to the layer, it moves it to a new
layer.
So, now, we've got these on two separate layers.
Now there is a reason for this and that's because this type, when I create this layer
style, it's going to look good on the big type, but it's going to look horrible on the
small type, so I'm also going to show you how to make one size fit all. So we're going
to concentrate on the CAFE part and then we're going to apply it to the Photoshop part and
make it look good.
I've seen people apply these layer styles
that look hideous on type because it's not designed for the right size of types, so I'm
going to show you. At the very end, you're going to see how to resolve that and make
any layer style work on any type. So, anyway, now that we've got that, I'm going to create
this layer style, so I'm going to go into the layer style effect here, and I'm going
to go down to patterns.
I want to add a pattern over the top of this.
We're going to click the Pattern Overlay and what have I got here? I've got my diagonal
line here. If you want this pattern, this pattern does not come with Photoshop by default.
If you want to find the patterns, click on here, you can see all the patterns, and you
can click on here to load all the different patterns that come with Photoshop.
This, here, is one that I created. I'd be
happy to share it with you. Just click the link beneath to go grab it. All right, so
what we're going to do with this is let's play around with the scaling. Do I want to
scale it a little bit bigger? Yeah, maybe like that, looks pretty cool. And I don't
like the way it interacts, it just feels a little much.
But before we do that, what we're going to
do is we're going to create an Overlay. Rather than giving it a solid color, I'm going to
go under a Gradient. And you can see, here, you can click on a Gradient Editor. This top
part here, adjust the Opacity and the bottom part there, adjust the color, so I'm just
going to actually play around with the Opacity and I'll drop it down a little bit. And I
don't like this color, so I'll just click there on the swatch, and let's find a more
interesting blue. I like that one better. It doesn't feel so hokey.
Let's click on this one or you can double
click to open the color swatch. So let's play around with one that is going to be a little
bit more, you know, aqua kind of a color. That's just a little much. Let's play around
there. I like that. There's a nice interaction that's going on. Click OK.
And, now, what I want to do, though, is change
the-- because notice this is kind of going across at an angle. I just want this to go
up and down. So if I change that, that will do it, and we can change the scale too. Notice
if I make the scale very low, see how it changes, right there? As I increase that scale, it
creates a smoother gradient across there.
All right, that's pretty awesome. That's our
layer style to start with. Let's go back to our Pattern Overlay now and see if we can
make our blend a little nicer. So what have we got here? How does the overlay look? Looks
like someone just drew over the top of it. It's too strong. The Soft Light is not bad,
actually, but I'm just going to take the Opacity down a little more because I want to make
this pattern, not so solid, but make it a little bit more, you know, just kind of blended
in. So, all right, that looks good.
So what I'm going to do now is I am going
to add the metallic effect to the background. So let's just go back under the Effects here
and we're going to do that right now. Now we're going to add the sheen, the glassy sheen
at the very end. So what we're going to do here is we're going to do the background here.
So I want to create some kind of, you know, a metal edge.
So I'm going to do that with Stroke. So I'm
going to create the stroke here and I'm going to make it a little bigger. Actually, we'll
change the size here. I was changing the scale. I apologize. So let's change the size up there
a little bit. Position should be outside, Blend Mode is Normal, and we've chosen a gradient
here for the Fill Type, and in the Gradient, I'm using is just a black to white gradient.
So we're just going to hit the OK key and you can see what we've got going there.
Now, what we're going to do with this now
is we want to-- I'm going to bring that scale back to 100 because I don't even know what
that's going to do, it's going to mess something up. And now, what we're going to do is we're
going to add the stroke on it, so we're going to choose Bevel and Emboss and notice, immediately,
it looks good and that's because it remembers my last settings.
So let's have a look here. What have we set
here? We set it to a Stroke Emboss, because it's any other type of emboss, it doesn't
do anything on the stroke, except we go up here, we change it to a Stroke Emboss. I've
got it to Smooth. I've turned that Depth all the way up and let's play around with the
size a little bit more, get it better; kind of like it there. So push that up a little
bit. I'm not going to soften it.
Notice I'm using this contour here. You can
try different ones, but a lot of the time, this particular one here, I like this shape
on. It gives a glassy metallic effect. And then, what we're going to do is go on to Contour
and notice that Contour really makes it snap. Make sure Anti-alias is turned on. So we could
try the same kind of thing here if you want that same type of effect, or we can play around
with the different ones. I kind of like this one because it makes it look like we're cutting
out the edges. I really like that.
And then, what we're going to do is give this
one a little bit of a Drop Shadow here. So we're just going to turn on Drop Shadow, and
notice that the color here for the Drop Shadow has changed to blue. Let's change it to more
of this aqua color and see how it just kind of makes it look like it's a bit more glassy.
Just black would make it look like, you know, a typical drop shadow, but this makes it look
like this is a little bit semi-transparent, so let's bring that down a little bit. And
you can kind of see how that's looking.
Now we're going to give this glassy effect
at the top, once again at the very end. So see how that's not bad. We're pretty close.
So what I want to do now is I'm going to create the next part of the effect and I'm going
to do this on both these layers at the same time. So what I'm going to do is actually
just hit Ctrl Click, and that selects this area. I'm going to do the same for there,
so we've got all of these selected.
So what I'm going to do is create a new layer
on top, and then, I'm just going to take this layer. And then, what I'm going to do is I'm
just going to fill it with white. So Ctrl Backspace fills it with white. If we hide
the background, you can see what we've done. Awesome. So I'm going to hit the Alt key and
just drag around here to turn off the bottom one.
So I just want to work with this top one for
now. So what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to contract this. I'm going to choose
Select, Modify, Contract. Now the reason I selected this separately, by the way, I'm
going to make this 8, is because, once again, this is smaller and it's going to have a different
effect than the other one, which is larger. So I want to make sure it kind of balances
a little bit.
So what I would need to do now is I'm going
to inverse this selection. So I'm going to choose Select, Inverse, and now I've got select
Inverse, I'm going to choose to Select, and then, we're going to go down here and we're
going to Feather this. Now, if you remember, we contracted it by 8. I'm going to feather
it by about double. So we're going to do 16, click OK.
Now, when I hit the Delete key, something
interesting is going to happen. I'm going to hit Ctrl D. So what it did is it just kind
of let this go in the middle like that and it disappeared around the edges. So we're
just getting a little bit of that white in the middle. Now we're going to do the same
thing for this part of the text.
So let's just hide the background and we can,
you know, even hide everything else, so you can see what's going on. As you know what?
I just deleted that Cafe. That's fine. I'm just going to Ctrl Click on Cafe, and then,
we're just going to do the same thing. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm hiding the
background, by the way. Fill that with white by hitting the Ctrl Backspace key, fills it
with white.
Now we're going to do the same thing that
we did before. Select, Contract, Modify, Contract. This time I'm going to do it by 12, say, okay
that looks good, and we're going to select Inverse. Let's do Select Inverse here, so
we're going the other way now. And now we want to feather this, so we're going to choose
Modify, Feather.
And we're going to do something indeed with
the Contract because we're going to make it about 24, we're going to do about double,
click OK. And, now, hit the Delete key, and I'm just going to turn this off, Ctrl D. All
right, so you see we've got this PhotoshopCAFE thing here. Let me invert the background so
you can see it.
So what we've done is we've just created this
kind of a shape here. This is going to be our glassy reflection effect, and you'll see
how this is going to work. In a second, I'll turn everything else back on. Let's put this
one back to white. So what we're going to do with that layer—see there, it is there—we've
selected this. We're just going to add a layer style to it, so we're just going to go to
Select, here we're going to go Layer Style, give it a Bevel and Emboss.
Now let's see what kind of Emboss we're going
to give this one. I'm going to try Pillow Emboss and we're going to turn the Depth all
the way up, and let's turn the size down a little bit, and we could soften that, if we
wanted. But see how we're just kind of playing around with this, and one of the things you
might want to do is turn the Opacity down on-- Just turn the Opacity all the way up
on screen and turn it down there a little bit. Just try to balance this to kind of create
this little kind of a texture effect here.
And let's go on to Contour and we're going
to turn that Contour on. That looks good. Let's change the size of this a little bit.
I just want to get this to work. So it's quite small right now, we've got that at 2 and that's
looking good.
All right, so how do we transfer this effect
here from this layer onto the other layer? Well, I'm going to show you right now. I'm
going to grab what I did for the Cafe, I'm going to drag this into Photoshop. So I'm
going to hit the Option key or the Alt key and click on Effects, drag it into that type.
Notice that it copies it, but look at this, it's a little big, it looks weird. That's
okay.
This is how we fix it. Right click on Effects
there. This is on layer here, we want to shrink it down. Right click on
Effects and then choose Scale Effects. So under the Scale Effects, we can just pull
it down a little bit until it looks better.
Now I'm thinking about that looks pretty good.
That looks even better. Okay, so notice now that that fits that. Let's do the same thing
for this overlay rappy thing that we've done. I know that's a very technical term. So let's
take the effect, we go to Option, click on there and drag it into there. So, now, we've
got that same effect on the top part.
Once again, do the same thing, click on Effects,
right click, Scale Effects. So we're going to take this and pull it down a little bit,
and we'll get this where it's going to look good because it just needs to be small. There
we go. That's about 30% there, click OK, and this still feels a little bit thick, so let's
go back under there, right click, scale these effects, and bring it down a little bit more.
Go down and we're going to scale the effects
and pull them down a little bit more until it looks good. There we go, that's nice. Click
OK and there we go. We created this cool kind of a style here, so it's just kind of a cool
type effect here. And what I'm going to do just to save you a bunch of time is I'm actually
going to create this into a Layer Style, so let me go on to here. You got two layer styles
here. You got the first one for the type—that's that one.
If I just click here, it's going to convert
it to a layer style. You know I was going to call it thingy, but then I will call it
"metal edges," okay? So there we go, boom. We've got that one with the metal edges on
it, and then, what about the glassy? The glassy effect, that's kind of, I don't know what
to call that. It's kind of a bubbly thing, okay? We'll call it "bubbly sheen," so why
don't we go to the styles there, click here, and we're going to save that one. Bubbly sheen
is Charlie Sheen's brother.
All right, so what I'm going to do, then, is I'm going to give you these layer styles,
just that same length, I'm going to give you the texture, I'm going to give you the two
layer styles, so, guys, I hope you enjoyed this.
Well I hope you enjoyed this. It's been a
while since I did a text effect. If you want me to do more text effects, let me know. If
you want me to do more kind of 3D-ish kind of design or effects, let me know in the Comments
underneath, and I'm here to serve, here to please. So whatever you want to learn, let
me know and like a genie, I'll pull it out of the bottle and I'll do it for you. Well,
if that can be done, of course, within reason.
All right, so, anyway, thanks. Hit that Subscribe
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thanks for watching guys, until next time, don't forget, hit that Like button if you
liked this. I would really appreciate that.