Tip supplied by Rick Nelson
(Spamola)
Open a new RGB image. Type your text in black on a new layer.
In
the channels palette, drag one of the channels to the "new channel"
icon. This will create channel 4. Duplicate
channel four to make channel 5. Invert channel 5 (ctrl/cmd+i) so it
appears as white text on a black background.
Make channel 5 active. Now load channel 5 as a new
selection. To do this, you can either hit select/new selection and choose channel 5 from
the pull down menu or you can save some hassle and hold the ctrl/cmd key
and click on channel 5.
Now
you have something that looks like the above image with a selection border
(marching ants) around your text. Invert the
selection (ctrl/cmd+shift+i) so that it borders the whole image as well as
your selection. I can't get the selection border with my screen capture,
so you'll have to use your imagination.
Tip for new users:
If you are not sure what is or is not selected, select some godawful color such as pure cyan or bright orange as your background color and hit ctrl/cmd+delete. You can see what is selected because it will turn that horrible color. Be sure to hit undo before you do anything else!
Now
you need to get a nice fade on your text that starts with white on the inside and fades to a dark gray. There's several ways to
do this with photoshops native tools as well as third party plugin filters
(KPT gradient designer set to circular shapeburst). To keep things simple,
first make sure your background color is black (keystroke d, then
x). Feather the selection (select/feather) by five pixels and hit
delete.
(Still a little too light around the edges...hit delete once
more.)
(Perfect!)
We're done playing with the channels. Go back to the
layers palette and
select a new layer. Hit ctrl/cmd+d to make sure nothing is selected. Fill
it with something...anything! You can use a pattern, solid fill, gradient,
image or whatever you want.
You'll be using the "lighting effects" filter to create the
beveled look. If you haven't worked much with lighting effects, don't get frustrated
and give up. Once you learn how to use it, you'll find it is one of the
most useful filters for all kinds of text effects.
Tip for new users: .
After filling a new layer, open the "lighting effects" menu
(filter/render/lighting effects). If I remember
correctly, "lighting effects" is the only thing in Photoshop that uses
floating point math to create true 3D effects. It uses a grayscale texture
channel to determine what is "high" or "low" depending on the brightness
of each pixel.
We'll use a single white light coming from the upper left side.
For the light type and properties, I used the following settings:
Light type: Omni Intensity: 20 Gloss: 0 Material:
0 Exposure: 0 Ambience: 0 Texture Channel: #5 White is
high
You'll probably have some horrible banding. I got rid of it
(much to my surprize)
by converting the image to a 64 color indexed mode with difusion
dithering.
Remember channel 4? You can load that as a new selection,
feather it by one pixel, and hit delete to remove the background.
Good luck!
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