Friday 11 July 2014

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




No comments: