Lesson Info
3. Adding Depth to Text
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Lesson Info
Adding Depth to Text
Well now I'm gonna stylize that logo by adding a hint of dimension to it. Not true 3D, but more illustrative dimension where I'm gonna use layer styles, and I'm gonna try to make it look as if the letters and the text kind of weave where one part of a letter might go on top of another portion. So if you're at all new to Photoshop, do not watch this lesson unless you just want to see what it's capable of and some of the things you could learn. I have refined this just a little bit. All I did was I played with the shape of the letter Y to make it look a little smoother than what we ended up with in that particular lesson. But the concept is the same with how I got here. Then let me show you what we're gonna end up doing to this. So here I have some various layers that we're gonna end up creating. And I'm first gonna try to add a little bit of dimension to this text. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a highlight on the text to define what direction the light's coming from. So if you look...
, the light is coming from above and to the left. But if the light is coming from there, then we should have some sort of a shadow being cast in the opposite direction, going down and to the right. And if I want this text to look like it has some dimension, I might want to add some thickness on the edge of the text, and I'm gonna do that with this layer right here. And so there we have our little highlight and some thickness, and it's a little bit hard to see, but there is a shadow in here as well. But then I want to make it look as if certain parts of these letter strokes are going on top of others, like the letter L. I want it to look, let's say, as if this portion of the letter L is going on top of this horizontal line, and therefore its highlight should continue across there. And the thickness that I've developed here should also continue across, that then when it comes over here and this here should be underneath, then this highlight going on that horizontal bar should continue across. And its little false thickness here should also continue across, and that's not the easiest thing to accomplish. So in order to do that, let's turn on some layers here. First I'm gonna make the highlight extend across where I think it should. So I'm gonna turn on a layer here called highlight above, and I'll turn it back off and back on just so you can get a sense for it. Then I'm gonna get the shadows. Wherever those highlights are breaking across, the shadow, or I should say the thickness, should break across, and so that's what this is. So now if you look at it, look at the letter I and L and just follow it. Here, it looks like it's going underneath, then it looks like it's going above, and then it loops around and is going under, and then here it's going above again and under. And that's what I'm gonna show you how to do. In the process, you're gonna learn about vector masks. Vector masks is where we have a path that either causes a layer to be visible or hidden, and that's what we're gonna use to only get certain portions of that little highlight in the shadow to show up. But we're gonna have to use a combination of not only those vector mask, but also a layer mask and a special feature that allows that layer mask to hide the effects. Let's start by adding some thickness to our logo. I'm gonna do that by duplicating this layer. There are many different ways of duplicating a layer. I'm just used to typing command J, control JM Windows to jump that to a new layer. Then I can take this layer and I'm gonna call it digital match tree logo thickness. (keyboard clicking) And I'm gonna put it underneath. Therefore, it's going to be covered up by our original logo. Now what I'd like to do is move this down and to the right. Use the move tool to do so. I could use my arrow keys, which I'll do right now, and if I go down and to the right, I want to end up with something about like that. Then I'm gonna make that area darker. So I'm gonna go over here and use my eyedropper tool. I'm gonna click on the color that currently in the text, therefore my foreground color will change to it. I'll click on my foreground color and I'm gonna darken. I'll just go over here to the letter B for brightness. I'll do down arrow key a few times, and get it to be a bit darker. So here's our original color, and here's the color we're ending up with. Then I wanna get this layer that contains the logo that's duplicated to be filled with that particular color. There's a keyboard shortcut that I use for that and it's fill with foreground color is what you would call it. And on a Mac it's option delete. On Windows, that would be alt backspace. And that usually fills the entirety of your layer with that particular color. But this layer is a special layer, it is a vector, and it has a path that is limiting where that color is showing up. So anyway, you see the thickness that's there, but it's not really what I wanted. Because look at the top of this little loop or the end of this little bar and notice the gap between it and the duplicate. I don't want that gap. I want this all filled in. And so let's figure out how we can do that. To accomplish that, I wanna actually work on the path that defines this layer. So I'm gonna go over here to my arrow tool. I'll go for the solid arrow tool. And I'm gonna draw around this whole thing. I'll just click near the upper left, and in fact I can probably work just as it is 'cause all of the things are highlighted. But I'm gonna click and drag like this to make a box around the whole thing just because it's what I'm used to doing. Then if you use the arrow keys on your keyboard, you could nudge that path one pixel at a time. But what I want to do is nudge a duplicate of the path one pixel at a time. To nudge a duplicate, all you need to do is hold down the option key in a Mac, alt in Windows. That same thing works with layers. If you wanted to move a duplicate of a layer, you could hold down the option key when you're in the move tool, and then use the arrow keys to move the layer to nudge it and you'd be nudging a duplicate. So let's see what happens. I'll hold down the option key and I'm gonna do up arrow key. Then I'm gonna do left arrow key. Up arrow key, left arrow, up arrow, left arrow, up arrow, left arrow, up arrow, left arrow. I'm gonna do that until we're right back to where the original text began. I'm holding down the option key the entire time. And I think I'm there now. At least it looks like it's lining up. Now, I'm seeing a lot of little blue in here. That's because those are individual paths. There's a whole bunch of paths now sitting right next to each other, but each one of those paths is causing that particular layer to show up, so it's just giving me that thickness. If I were to click away out here so none of them are selected, now look at that horizontal bar that's there and notice there's this nice straight little line coming over, a diagonal line coming over to meet that other part, and there's not that gap that we had earlier. The only thing is I'd like this layer to not be made out of like 20 different paths. I want it to be made out of just one. So I'm gonna zoom out by typing command zero, and I'm gonna use that solid arrow tool, the black one. I'm gonna click up here in the upper left and drag like this across the entirety of the image and that should get all of the paths that make up that particular layer selected. Finally, I'm gonna come up here to this little icon in my options bar, and there's where I'm gonna find merge shape components. And that means combine together all those paths into a path that describes just the outer shape and doesn't have all the little duplicates involved. So when I choose that, now this is gonna look a little simpler, and therefore it looks as if I just kind of drew it with that thickness.
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Debi McManus-Plett
Lisa Brown
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