Raised Brushed Gold Text
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One of the great new features in Version 6 of Paint Shop Pro is the ability to apply special effects, such as inner and outer bevels, patterns, and textures, to name a few. Custom settings that you make to create your own effects can be saved in a file called a "preset". Your preset file name appears in the list along with the presets supplied by Jasc so all of your settings are saved and easily recalled. This tutorial demonstrates the Inner and Outer Bevel effects using presets.
To create the text effect above, you'll need to download two presets I created, along with a small image file that is used by one of the presets. They are in a zip file called RaisedBrushedGold.ZIP (11KB). Download
Unzip the files to folders within your Paint Shop Pro 6 directory as follows:
- "Flat Gold.psc and "Raised Metallic.pbv" to the Presets folder
- Gold_BP.pat to the Patterns folder
Click on the New button to open a new image and set the options in the New Image dialog to match those below:
- Width: 500 pixels
- Height: 150 pixels
- Resolution: 72 (or higher)
- Background Color: any color
- Image Type: 16.7 million colors (24 Bit)
Click the OK button.
Click on the Text tool and then center your cursor in the new image and click. The Text Tool dialog box will open. Press the Delete key to clear out any text that might be displayed in the lower window. Set the options in the dialog as follows:
- Font Name: I used Cookie for this example. Cooper Blk BT is almost the same. If you don't have either of those, pick a font that is thick.
- Size: I set mine to 48.
- In the "Create As" section, check Selection and Antialias.
- Set the text to be centred as shown below, and pick any color. (The color will be replaced by a pattern.)
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Click in the text entry window and type your text. Click the OK button. Your chosen text will display in the new image, surrounded by a moving marquee. At this writing, the beta version of PSP 6 doesn't center text vertically as it did in PSP 5. If you want to reposition the selection, click on the Mover tool, right-click on the selection, and drag the text to the desired location.
Go to Image > Effects > Sculpture... and apply the "Flat Gold" preset. Click the OK button.
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If there are any gaps where the Sculpture effect didn't fill the selection, undo and reapply the preset but enlarge the scale of the pattern so the selection is covered. This could happen if the font size you choose was much larger than the one used in this exercise.
Go to Selections > Modify > Contract.... In the Contract Selection dialog, enter "1" as the "Number of pixels" value and click the OK button.
Go to Selections > Modify > Feather.... In the Feather Selection dialog, enter "1" as the "Number of pixels" value and click the OK button.
Click on the Invert Selection button or, if this button isn't displayed on your toolbar, go to Selections > Invert. The background area will now be selected.
Click on the Flood Fill tool.
If the "Tool Options" box is not already open, type a lower-case "o" to open it. Match your settings to the ones at the left.
Click the Flood Fill Tool. Then click on the Foreground color square in the Color Palette.
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The Jasc Color dialog box will open. Click on the color square of your choice and click the OK button. (I've shown only the upper-left hand portion of the dialog box.)
With the Flood Fill tool, click inside the selected background area to apply the fill.
Click on the Invert Selection button or, if this button isn't displayed on your toolbar, go to Selections > Invert. The text will again be selected.
Go to Image > Effects > Outer Bevel... and apply the "Raised Metallic" preset. Click the OK button.
Go to Image > Effects > Inner Bevel... and apply the "Metallic" preset. Click the OK button.
Remove the selection (Selections > Select None), crop as desired, and save the file in the format of your choice.
The Last Word
- The reason for contracting and then feathering the selection by one pixel is to blur the edge slightly to help prevent the jaggies.
- I normally prefer to save web images in GIF format but it doesn't work very well with gradients. Gradients have a high color depth and reducing it creates visible color separations. Since the text in this lesson is basically a gradient, I found that saving the file as a JPEG gave better results. You can also save in PNG format to retain the quality but the resulting file size is much larger and the format is not supported by all browsers.
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