Stacks

Some experiments what happens when you layer highlights on top of each other.

Here i used three basetext-layers, each one shrinked a bit.
There is one big bevel, with the highlight slightly blueish and three bevels on top of it. Each one tightened with an alpha-curve.

If you want to study the effect, here is the .xcf-file:

https://www.mediafire.com/?t1atd75fa4lqvwv

Kings, the tutorial

This effect is a variation on fencepost's Lord Of The Rings Effect.

You should do the tutorial before you try this one.

What Esper did next

Chisel Effect

This is a rewrite of the tutorial for fencepost's so called Lord Of The Rings texteffect.

I recreated it from the script as good as i could, because the original tutorial is lost with the forum it was posted on.
Every time a script is written for an effect, knowledge is forgotten. With this tutorial i want to preserve that knowledge.

The effect creates a chiselled look on text with the help of a shaped gradient.

LASR: Fire & Ice

Exploring the possibilities of G'MIC, i found the Color Temperature Filter (thats under Colors).
I wasnt totally happy with the LASR text i posted yesterday, but this filter improves the overall effect from hot to cold !

Waves

XCF for above effect.

An exercise what can be done with alpha-curves.

Metallick

The Ultimate Oldskool Chrome-Effect

A texteffect i made by following a tutorial by Shawn Kent:

http://vimeo.com/73904037

An updated and improved version of  this effect can now be found here:

Gimplearn/Displacement Chrome/Glass Effect

His video-tutorial is based on an old 90ies Photoshop effect book, called the 'WOW Book 4'.

Because Gimp doesnt have the same filters as PS, i recreated the effect by using the Displacement Filter.

Instead of using the channel technique that didnt work for me, i just made a frame by shrinking the alpha selected text by an amount i wanted for the bevelling, then cut and blurring the frame.

So i end up with a blurred frame on a transparent layer and used that as my Displacement-Map.
You chose pretty big values for the displacement because you want a zigzag effect on the original image.
And thats really it.

I added a bevel with layerfx and applied anisotropic smoothing in G'MIC to make some of the jaggy distortions a bit nicer.

As you may remember, i have talked about landscapes as gradients inside a texteffect before. In case you missed it, here are the relevant posts:

http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/2013/05/unknown-territory-full-cycle.html

http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/2013/05/the-power-of-megablast.html

Layer Play

This is an exercise in playing with layering gradients and textures. 

The Inner Glow has different values for horizontal and vertical.

The texture is made from a Grid with Spread and then Motion Blurred.

The Ultraviolent font is from Blambot.

Shiny Tekniqz

All texteffects in this post follow the same principle:

• The basetext is filled with a texture (an image or a gradient).
• The basetext has a stroke made of a gradient that gives the edges of the text a shiny look.
• The basetext has an outer bevel. Highlight and shadow are treated with curves to give the bevel a shiny look.

The texture of this texteffect is a metallic gradient.

I also applied the G'MIC Fish Eye Filter to the gradient layer as you see below.

The shiny edge gradient is no custom-gradient, just the normal FG-BG on repeat but treated with a colour-curve.

Here the texture is a scaled image of the sea, i found with google.

The shiny edge gradient consists of two gradients layered and blended with layermodes. A bit of curves as well, of course ;)

Same texture as above again, but this time treated with the new G'MIC 'Frosted Glass' filter that Ronounours created and then bumpmapped with itself.

The Inner Shadow between shiny edge and texture got the ring-contour treatment.

For this experiment i used the Square Gradient.

shiny diagonal Edges

Same technique as in the previous tutorial, but with a different 'Shape', 'Repeat' and a simple 2-color gradient. Then Colour-Curves.

shiny Edges

Edged the sequel

Edged

Strange Dayz

This is inspired by (still) learning Inkscape, my interest in Graffiti and, believe it or not, having a very close look at wrapping (mini-salami, chocolate bars, potatoe chips, etc).

A lot of text on wrappings has this formulatic style.

So i just made the bevelled text with a colourful highlight and added the red outset halo by growing the alpha selected text.

The white halo is the red-outset selection filled with a gradient (from white to transparent), then blurred and shaped with a Ring-Contour Alpha-Curve.

This halo duplicated and motion-blurred gave me the 3D extrusion.

But the secret ingredient is something else:

G'MIC -> Graphic Novel Filter

gives the text this nice sophisticated looking shading....;)

The Empire Strikes Back

Yesterday i revisited the Amber texteffect i made in march.

Although the xcf had a lot of notes, i was unable to recreate the texture inside the inlay. I know i did it with the cubism filter, but it didnt look the same this time.

So i modified the effect. In some cases its an improvement, as i have learnt a lot in the past six months.

As usual im not explaining every tiny detail, as i expect you to know stuff from previous tutorials.

This effect requires you to work on your side, to make everything blend nicely.

Its art, not programming !

Amber Delft

Amber revisited

Flex The Technique

More Ellipsionism-Filter.

Filter Stripes

Inspired by the way Photoshop filters work, i experimented with making textures.
Everything you see in the image  below is made from the same diagonal grid.

Treebark

I was playing around with texture effects today and made this as a byproduct.

Its kind of unusal for me i guess....:D

Walkthru:

Gold is the sweat of the sun !

In this tutorial im going to show you how to make two different gold texteffects.

Fresh Gradients - The Tutorial

In this tutorial i will show you how i made the gradients from my last two posts.

Upcoming: The Fresh Gradients Tutorial

This is a technique how to get interesting gradients without fighting your gradient editor.
Its fun and intuitive.

Style Wars with myself

Im trespassing, im beating my system.

Im putting my names up there, right.

I've drenched this blog with my ideas.

[Well, Im trying my damndest.]

http://youtu.be/oY6XlJt71Bw

Colourful 3Dish Text With A Stroke

Here i will show you how to create the colourful text made with the german flag gradient from my last post.

Four More

Four Styles that all follow the same principle:

a gradient, an inner shadow and a stroke.

A Simple Three Dimensional Looking Text With A Stroke

In this tutorial i will show you a simple yet effective 3Dish effect and some variations.
Its basically just a Gradient, a Stroke and an Inner Shadow,
later modified with an small Bevel and some decorational elements like a Dropshadow an an Outer Glow.

Warpainting

Some stuff i made a few weeks ago. Lots of crazy bumpmapping involved.

A Bunch Of Tricks (tweaking Glows and Shadows)

In this tutorial i will show you my technique on how to find the right color for stuff like Shadows or Glows.

Its quite simple !

Glass Experiments

The basic idea is bevelling text with the contour 'Rolling Slope desc.' and for the gloss contour 'Double Ring'.

I did the contour with layerfx but the gloss contour manually with curves, because you get better results.

Tried several contours: 'Cone' and 'Cove deep'.

All three results have G'MIC 'Light Glow' on top.

chromed Bumpmapping

Shrinking selection in 3px steps, then converted to a path, stroke by 1px and blurred by 2px as the bumpmap.

Chrome curves, 'anisotropic smoothing' and 'Light Glow'.

In this version i tried to get the same effect with Lighting effects, using the bumpmap, but for some reason the filter doesnt recognise much detail.
It was good for adding colour though.

The cushion effect comes from the G'MIC Relief Light filter.

BumpMapping Level II

I think there is a lot of potential in bumpmapping that is overlooked and today im going to show you how you can add some complexity to the basic technique.

The key element of bumpmapping is blurring and as all my gimp-scientist-padawans know, blur means you can shape it with an alpha-curve ! :)

Chrome Curves

I already posted a tutorial about alpha-curves that are good for shaping the alpha-channel. In this tutorial its all about Value or Chrome-Curves.

The channel of the curves-tool is set to the default of 'Value' (instead of Alpha).

Chrome-Curves are a way of shaping a gradient (for example), into something that looks metallic or chromed.

Kitsch Chrome

In this tutorial i will show you how to create a psychedelic cartoony kitsch chrome texteffect.

Its based on monsoonami's chrome tutorial from youtube, but coloured instead of monochromatic.