Sunday 24 November 2013

The Ultimate Oldskool Chrome-Effect

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


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

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