Text Effects


This tutorial requires the special anti-aliased fonts to be installed on your system as part of the Install process. Install them in "fonts:" or elsewhere (and then use the ColourFonts.rx macro see the Arexx reference section for more details) .

Alpha channels allow very powerful image manipulations. Here we will show you how to create some different fancy text effects starting from a simple plain font (or for better results an anti-aliased colour font).

The first step is to enter some text. Select 'Open as/Other...' from the menu and click on the TEXT loader. Select a font. You can use any font for this, but the larger the font the better the results will look. Choose the Bodacious font (if you have installed it to your hard drive) and select the size 85 from the righthand column. Then click on the OK button.

Enter some text now. We will type "Amiga" into the gadget.

A new buffer is created, called Unnamed, with the Amiga text in a plain white font on a black background. If you zoom in with the magnify tool you can see that the edges of the letters are not sharp, they have a blurred outline called anti-aliasing. This makes the font look smoother than other standard fonts. Zoom out again by clicking on the button to the right of the magnify button.

If you are using a standard font (not a colour font) you can blur the edges and smooth it out by using the Blur or Heavy Blur paint modes.

The next step is to clone the buffer. Select the Clone option from the Project menu. You will now have two identical pictures. Move the window for the new image to the bottom of the screen so you can see both buffers (they may be overlapped slightly on some systems - do not worry!).

Select the second buffer (marked Copy_of_unnamed) by clicking in the window titlebar (the window border will turn blue). Go to the image menu and choose Gaussian Blur. Select a Blur radius of 4 and click on OK. Warning! This may take a long time to complete. Gaussian Blur is a very powerful and complex operator.

We are making a heavily blurred version of the text to use as the starting point for our text effects. Once it has finished, select the original text (the buffer you did not blur) and press key '3' to use it as an alpha -channel. Select the blurred buffer again, chose 'Emboss' from the paint mode list (the MODE button on the toolbar), and click on the Fill Screen gadget (the white square above the FIX gadget).

Now we have some text that appears to be a raised, embossed text. It looks quite nice as it is, but we can play around some more and try some different tricks....

First click on the FIX gadget to make this change permanent.

Now try some different paint modes. Fill the screen again and open the Modes window from the Windows menu (or press Amiga-M) so the window stays open. Click on different modes to experiment - you can see how different modes provide different effects.

AddDust and AddNoise turn the boring grey text into a more stonelike grainy texture.

Monochrome (assuming you haven't changed the current colour) turns the inside of the text dark leaving the outer glow of the letters. Paint leaves the glow but fills the inside of the letters with the selected colour. Tint changes the colour inside, but leaves the nice embossed texture.

We will do a combination of different effects. First we will select AddDust and click on Fix. Now select GradientTint from the modes list, click on the Fill Screen button and fix again.

Now we want to change the outer glow to a different colour. To do this we have to invert the Alpha Channel (the alpha channel determines which bits of the picture are altered. So far we have only been altering the inside of the letters, now we only want to alter the outside). Select Invert Alpha from the Alpha/Paint Layer menu.

Now fill the screen again and set the paint mode to tint. The outer glow changes colour to yellow, which was the colour we had previously set. Open the palette requester (click on the Yellow box in the toolbar or press the 'p' key). Select a new colour, try Blue from the list on the right. Then click on the 'Use' button. It's too dark. So we can change it with the sliders. Change the hue slider (H) by moving it to the left until you get a value of around 138. You should now see a brighter, more cyan, shade of blue. Click on Use again.

Close the palette requester and click on FIX to apply this change. Now, the outer glow isn't big enough. Simple. Choose the 'Maximum' paintmode and fill the screen again. Now the glow will expand into the dark background. Fix it and fill and fix again.

And that's it. A nice colourful logo created in a few minutes. And it's so easy to change this procedure. Apply a few Negatives, blurs, different tints or filters to create totally different effects.

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