CREATING COOL TEXT EFFECTS: A GRAPHICS TUTORIAL


                      Corinna Cohn                                                                                                                          gemini@indy.net
[For reference, the end result of this tutorial, AmigaReportTutorial.JPG, has been included in the magazine. -Jason]

Let's face it, text is important. In order to catch attention, you need to have cool, interesting, and innovative text to catch the eye of the observer. I'm going to go step by step to show how I did the effect for the improv Amiga Report logo I did.

For the first step, I needed a program that could load a large number of fonts, and hopefully do other nice and interesting effects. As I own ArtExpression, I had to settle for something that could load PostScript fonts. Since Amiga Report is a news zine, I decided to pick an appropriate styletype. Having wild, exciting, bizarre, or groovy text was out for this particluar purpose, as I can only assume that something called Amiga Report has at least a moderately serious edge to it.

I chose Times-Roman because this is a typeface that is commonly associated with newspapers. I also sketched in a cute little checkmark to go with the text effect... maybe I'll use it, maybe I wont.

I save the work as a PostScript file. I could have saved the work as a standard IFF file, however that causes the file to be saved as a specified resolution. On the other hand, saving as an IFF means that you can load the file into nearly any program.

This stage involved importing the text into a more capable program, (essentially, anything that does not say ArtExpression on the box), and for this I used ImageFX 2.1. Since IFX2.1 has a PostScript import module, (using the hgpost datatype), and I decided to have the resolution as a 425x550, and cropped it to 425x253. The resolution is a little bit low, but for what I'm doing, it will work just fine.

This is where a dab of artistic flair comes in handy. Fortunately a dab is all that is required, for that is all I posses! Now, I conceptualize what this will look like. Will it be modern? Classic? New Age? I think that I will start with it having a modern background, and then afterwards, work on the text. I swap buffers, and then select "Create New Buffer" and size it to swap (If you remember, since we swapped the buffers, the one we were working on now becomes the "swap"). Going to the palette, I create a range of greys, (for that modern look). After trying out a couple of experimental fills, I decide to go with a nice wheel filled from the middle of the screen.

First, I swapped buffers again to bring me back to the first screen, and I decided to do something about that checkmark. This was simple. I loaded a rainbow texture that I had laying around, (I think I grabbed it off of someone's home page), so I loaded it as a brush, and then did a brush fill on the checkmark. I then cut out the brush, and then removed the spot where the checkmark, as I did not want it to be there permanently.

Black text on a white background faced me. The words "Amiga" and "Report" sat atop one another, the "G" in Amiga fitting in the depression in "Report". Nice. Now I do any special effects to the shape of the text. Since I don't want anything particularly fancy for this, I simply add a small amount of anti-aliasing. If you want to get crazy, try the dream effect first. Groovy, man. I then copied the screen to the Alpha channel. This will become my texture later in the process.

I decide that I want a shadow effect, so I roll my current buffer by about 5 pixels. Now I swap buffers again to bring me back to the wheel fill. Setting the fill options to normal/rub through/use alpha as friskit, I used a filled box to select the whole screen. This causes the box to rub through the entire screen except what was protected by the alpha channel. The Text is filled by what is left of the wheel-filled screen, and the text now has a shadow beneeth it.

I throw the checkmark back in. Easy. Just make sure all of the drawing modes are reset to their defaults.

Excuse me? How did I stick it behind the text? Well, I'm glad you asked, because otherwise I wouldn't have answered. I created a range of colors from black to almost pure white. Emphasis on almost. I then chose to exclude that range from receiving colour wiht my draw options. Easy as cake.

Well, everything turned out pretty good, but I wanted to fine tune things a little bit. First of all, sticking in the checkmark messed up some of my lettering. I repaired that using the pantograph draw option. I toned the white down to 235/235/235rgb I scaled it down to 380x200. I ran Unsharpen Mask to bring out the edges a little better.

This is a very important step. The format that you save your work in usually depends on a variety of things. How much space does your work need to fit in? I don't have a lot of space on my hard drive, therefore, I usually use JPEG. If you are using this for a WWW page, you probably want to save it in GIF. If I had the space for it, I would save my work as IFF24.

Now you criticize your work and lament about how bad it turned out. At least, that's what I do. :)
If you care to see any of my work, please http://www.indy.net/~gemini

This tutorial is Copyright 1995 by Corinna Cohn. This tutorial is freely distributable.