391 Creating letters chiseled into stone

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! This week, we're gonna take some plain old type in Photoshop, and we are going to chisel it into stone. And incidentally, this is a response to a member request, which I guess is my way of saying if you're looking for a solution to a design problem, just let us know. In the meantime, here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here are the final carved letters, just so you have a chance to see them on screen. We're gonna start off inside of this document that contains this editable text.

And just to show you how it's formatted, I'll go ahead and select the type tool. And I'll click anywhere inside this text, and you can see that it's all set in the font Trajan Pro Bold, which is included along with both the Creative Suite, and, or your subscription to the Creative Cloud. So, either way, you should have access to this font. Now I'm gonna go ahead and press the Escape key in order to escape out of the text entry mode. And this is a really great font for this purpose, because it has these nice weighted serifs, and it was designed to look like a carved font, as well.

Now, I'm going to need to convert this layer to a Smart Object, for reasons that will become evident later. But I don't want it to have this big, huge name, so I'm gonna double-click on the existing layer name and change it to just Cicero, which is this guy's last name. And then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac, to accept that modification. Now I'm gonna switch back to the Rectangular Marquis tool. And I'll right-click on my text and choose Convert to Smart Object. Next, you wanna go ahead and reduce the Fill value, here in the Layers panel, to zero.

And that's gonna make the text entirely invisible. And that way, we can build a Bevel & Emboss effect that looks like it's dug right into the stone. And I'll do so by dropping down to the fx icon and choosing Bevel & Emboss. And you can see that, by default, the style is set to Inner Bevel, but I want to increase the Depth value to about 500%. And I want the technique to be Chisel Hard. Now, these two values, Size and Soften, are gonna depend on the resolution of your image. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in here to 100% so we can see what's going on.

And I'll take this Size value up to 25 pixels. And notice how the edges are starting to rub up against each other. You want them to intersect all the way, so that this top edge disappears. And, for me, that happens at a Size value of 30 pixels, but if you're working in a higher resolution image, then you're gonna have to assign a larger size. I also wanna get rid of as much of the obvious chiseling as possible, that is, those little scrapey edges, so I'm gonna take my Soften value up to five pixels.

Now, you can experiment with the Angle and Altitude, to taste. I took the Altitude up to the 32 degrees, and I set the Angle value to 42 degrees, like so. Now, to my eye, that looks like the light is shining down on letters that are coming at me. And if you're experiencing the same effect, then you wanna change Direction from Up to Down, in order to produce this effect right here. Now, we need some more emphatic highlights and shadows, so I'm gonna start things off by changing the blend mode for the Highlights to Linear Dodge, and that'll give us some very enthusiastic highlights, as you can see here.

I wanna take 'em down a little bit, though, so I'll set the Opacity value to 66%. A color of white is just fine, but I want a different shadow color, so I'll click on that little black swatch, and I'll change the Hue value to 40 degrees. I'll take the Saturation value up to 100%, and I'll take the Brightness value down to 15%. And then, I took the Opacity value up to 77%, not much different than it is by default. And I changed the Shadow Mode to Linear Burn, in order to produce this effect, right here.

Now I wanna add a little bit of contouring to the letters, so I'm gonna click on the word Contour, directly below Bevel & Emboss. And I want you to keep a careful eye on the letters. I'm gonna change the Contour by clicking the down-pointing arrowhead and selecting this last icon in the top row, which is Gaussian, and we end up with this slightly different effect, right there. I'll go ahead and click off the Menu. Take a look at the letters. This is how they look without the Contour, and this is how they look with the Contour. So we're getting just a little bit of edge differentiation, which I think helps the credibility of the effect.

Now, I wanted to downplay the highlights a little bit, so I'm gonna add a Color Overlay effect. And I'll change the Blend Mode from Normal to Multiply. And in my case, the color is set to grey. I don't want that, so I'll click on that color swatch, and I'll change the Hue value, once again, to 40 degrees, which is a shade of orange. I'll take the Saturation value up to 50%, and I'll take the Brightness down to 33%. Then, click OK. And now, I'm gonna take the Opacity value down to 20%. And now I can click OK, in order to dismiss the Layer Style dialog box.

Alright now, if I zoom in a little more, you can see that we have some awfully sharp edges around these letters. And I'm gonna address that by applying Gaussian Blur, as an editable Smart Filter, which is why it's so great that I converted my text to a Smart Object, right at the outset. And so now, all I have to do is go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. And I came up with the Radius value of one pixel. If you're working in a higher resolution image, you may need to apply a higher value.

And then, go ahead and click OK. Now I'll press Control, zero, or Command, zero on Mac, to zoom out. Now, it's anybody's guess how somebody's gonna read this, whether they're gonna read these letters as being under-lit and coming at them or, the way I want them to read it, the letters are being lit from the upper right corner here, and the text is carved into the stone. But I think we can make things a little bit less ambiguous, if we have a little bit of a shadow on the highlight edge, because after all, if the light was coming from down left and it was hitting an edge going up, then there would be no shadow in front of it.

And it's gonna help if we have a little bit of highlight on the dark edge, as well, if only for the sake of differentiation. And so, here's how I pulled off that effect. I'm gonna start by right-clicking in this Filter Mask and choosing Delete Filter Mask to get rid of it, just so we have a little more room to work. And then I'm gonna press Control, j, or Command, j on a Mac, to create a copy of the Smart Object layer, and then I'll go ahead and click on the lower layer, and I'll double-click on its Bevel & Emboss effect. And what we're gonna do here is change the style from Inner Bevel to Outer Bevel, which is gonna give us just a hideous effect, and I'm also gonna change the Direction from Down to Up.

Now what we have so far is something we could achieve with just one layer set to Pillow Emboss, but by virtue of the fact that we have two different layers at work, I can change these other settings independently. So I'm gonna start by taking the Depth value down to 50%. And then, I'll take the Size value down to three pixels. And finally, I'm gonna change the Technique from Chisel Hard to Smooth, in order to produce this much more subtle effect here. And that's all there is to it.

Now, I can just go ahead and click OK, in order to apply that effect. And that, friends, is how you create a chiseled letter effect, in which the letters, very hopefully, appear to be carved into the stone, here inside Photoshop. Now, if you're a member of the lynda.com online training library, I have a follow-up movie, in which I show you how to add a chiseled border around your type. And it's an interesting exercise in the use of Shape Layers and Smart Objects. If you're waiting for next week's free movie, I'm gonna show you how to take a bunch of medical MRI scans, that stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, where you get in a tube, and they go (whirring) around you, and you can project those scans into 3D space in Photoshop.

By way of example, this is actually my own left knee. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.