Brushed Aluminium

This tutorial is an update of the brushed aluminium effect i posted one and a half years ago somewhere else.

The effect is very much based on the Satin, the rest is a bevel and a texture.

Lets begin:

1.)

Im using the font 'Simplified Arabic Bold', 250px, Spacing -6.
Colour: 4c4c4c

The background is 1000x400px, #9c9c9c.

2.)

Alpha select your text and save it to a channel for future use

3.)

Call up layerfx, make sure the basetext is active and apply Satin with the following values:

4.)

Add a bevel:

5.) Add a Dropshadow:

Alpha select your basetext, fill on a new transparent layer with black, deselect,Gaussian Blur by 8-10px.

That is the basic effect. You can tweak the Satin with an Alpha-Curve if you like.

In this example the Satin is tightened and you get a sharper look to the highlight.

Or do some funky stuff with your highlights and shadow. In this example i applied an Alpha-Curve (rounded steps) to the highlight.
(Open image in new tab to see better what i did)

This tutorial is called brushed aluminium, so we have to add a texture to the effect.

We will create this texture with Noise and Motion Blur.

a) create a new layer in 50ies grey (808080) on top of all layers

b) apply RGB Noise 0,2 and Motion Blur

c) add a layermask from channel, to get rid of everything outside the textboundaries and set the layermode to 'Soft Light'

d) you can play with the effect with Contrast and/or Levels, depending on what you want

i recommend going for a very subtle look – dont make it too stripey !

6.) To finish the project, i applied a bit of Noise to the background to make it look less clean and added a very subtle highlight, which is a radial gradient from white to transparent.

If you want to take this basic effect a step further, turn off the background layers and the dropshadow, then apply a new from visible and work with it.

Colourise:

G'MIC → Colors → Color Temperature (18):

And after a heavy filter orgy, i came up with this. Dont ask me how i did it, though :D