Egyptian gold text effects This image contains the text we will be making: 1. Setting up your color palette for this text. a) Right click on the image below and save it to your harddrive, changing the name while in save as mode to 'goldcolorpalette'. b) Open up PSP. Still have that 50x50 image of the color that matches the darkest parts of your background from last tutorial? If not, open up the background swatch you use in your AW persona's home and locate in the image a relatively dark color, set it as your foreground color by using the eye dropper tool. c) Open up a new image, 400wx200h, 16mill colors and image background set to that foreground color you just set. If not using in homes, just set it to transparent or whatever color you are working in. Minimize it on the screen. d) Open the image titled goldcolorpalette. Using the eyedropper tool, make your foreground color the dark gold color from goldcolorpalette image.(if this image gets lost, the color is #693708). e) Switch your foreground color to your background color in colorpalette area using the small black arrows in between the two color blocks. f) Using the eyedropper tool, make your foreground color the light yellow/gold color (if this image gets lost, the color is #F5B44D). Your color palette should now look like this~ 2. Setting up your gradient fills (for more info on what these are, please read post Text Effects intro). a) Click on the small right pointing arrow at the edge of your foreground's color block and a small side opening option panel should appear. Choose the gradient option, as shown below. b) Now click inside the foreground color block set to gradient. A dialogue box should pop up with gradient options. Use the following settings ~ (default gradient mode)foreground/background for style, simple fade mode (top circled choice), no repeat no directional changes, and leave that invert box unchecked. c) Repeat steps a and b, but this time for the background color block, and in settings leave the same except for check the box for 'invert'. Because it's foreground background mode, they should be in reverse of each other and should now look like this~ Your colors and gradients are now set, on to the meat of the tutorial. 3. Bring back up the new 400x200 image with the AW background-similar color set. Go up to LAYERS in top edit bar, down to NEW RASTER LAYER. Leave it at default settings, naming it TextLayer. 4. Select the text tool. Click one time on the center of your image, bringing up the dialogue box for text tools. Adjust for personal choice, but I am using the following settings ~ AntiAlias, size=36 (or 48, which I'm using here for better viewing), style Bold and 'floating'. Keep in mind though that floating is necessary to the rest of this tutorial, and that anti-alias keeps the text from being very jagged. If you want it jagged, dont check that box. The stroke and fill should automatically be set to foreground background gradient, since it was done in the colorpalette previously. Both Papyrus and Tempus Sans ITC look great for this, or of course some of the downloadable fonts mentioned in Text Effects Intro. Don't deselect it, there should be 'marching ants' all around it like mine below - 5. Create another new layer (LAYERS-->NEW RASTER LAYER) naming this one 'cutout', using default layer settings. 6. Now we are going to apply cut-out effect to the selected text in layer. Go to EFFECTS-->3D EFFECTS-->CUTOUT. A dialogue box should appear : Use the following settings : Vertical = 1, Horizontal = 1, color = Black, no fill, Opacity = 100, Blur = 2.5 7. Next step is to do a drop shadow. Go to LAYERS-->NEW RASTER LAYER, naming this one 'drop shadow'. 8. Go to EFFECTS-->3D EFFECTS-->DROP SHADOW. A dialogue box should appear ~ Use the following settings : Vertical = 1, Horizontal = 1, color = Black, opacity = 100, blur = 4.9 Repeat step 8, in same selection layer your already working in, but this time adjust the opacity to 60%. 9. Go up to SELECTIONS-->SELECT NONE. Then, go to LAYERS-->MERGE-->MERGE ALL FLATTEN. 10. Select the crop tool. Crop your welcome image down to a reasonable size, leaving a little space around the edge of the letters so that none of the drop shadow gets cut off, but not much! 11. Follow transparency steps in previous tutorial, using the export .gif wizard-FILE-->EXPORT-->GIF OPTIMIZER (if you have v7 or 8) or the COLORS-->SET PALETTE TRANSPARENCY style if you only have v6 or less. Here's my resulting image from this tutorial ~ Options in next post, including a brief explanation of how I made the title image different.~