From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

752 Enhancing the Candy Keeper text

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

752 Enhancing the Candy Keeper text

- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll enhance the text with the addition of a few layer effects in order to produce these letters right here. All right, so for starters I'll go ahead and select the Amatic layer. And as you may recall those are the skinny letters right there. And I want them to blend a little bit with the background. And so the first thing I'm going to do is changed the blend mode from Normal to Linear Light, which initially isn't going to make any difference whatsoever. We're still going to see white letters. But what that allows me to do is then turn around and reduce the opacity. Now, notice that the blend mode is stuck here in a PC. So, I'll just go ahead and press the Escape key, and that way I could then take the opacity value down to 70% just by tapping the seven key. And this assumes that one of the selection tools is active up here at the top of the toolbox. But I want you to notice what a boring effect that produces, especially when compared to reducing the fill opacity instead. So I'll go ahead and tap the zero key to take the opacity back up to 100%, and then I'll tap Shift + 7 in order to take the fill opacity down to 70%. And just so you can see the difference, I'll go ahead and bring up my history panel. And this is how things look when we have an opacity value of 70%, and this is how they look when we have the fill value of 70%. And that's because Linear Light is one of eight blend modes that react differently to the fill opacity value than they do to standard opacity. All right, I'll go ahead and zoom back out by pressing Control + 0, or Command + 0 on the Mac. And now I'm going to add a pretty conventional drop shadow by clicking on the fx icon down here at the bottom of the panel, and choosing Drop Shadow. Notice that my color is black, which is going to work just fine. And that the opacity value is 100%, and the angle value is 90 degrees. I've also gone ahead and set the distance to eight pixels. I've got a spread of 0%. And I've set the size to four pixels. At which point I'll click OK in order to apply that change. And that just helps those letters stand out a little better from the background. All right now I'll switch to the Ghoulish layer, which includes these fatter letters up here at the top and bottom of the composition. And now I'm going to change the color of this text. Now, because the text is expressed as a shape layer, I can just go ahead and double-click on this thumbnail in order to bring up the color picker dialogue box, and then I'm going to move my eyedropper cursor into one of these giant regions of brown, either in his eye sockets or in the background. And if you're working along with me, you should lift this exact color that has a hue value of 34 degrees, saturation of 91% and a brightness value of 21%. And by the way, this assumes that the sample option up here in the options bar is set to all layers. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change. Now that pretty much makes the letters disappear. But we're going to enhance those letters using a couple of stroke effects. Now, because this is a shape layer, I could go ahead and apply a conventional stroke, but you can only do one of those. So, I'm going to go with a layer effect instead. So I'll click on the fx icon, down here at the bottom of the layers panel. And I'll choose this guy, stroke. And I'm going to change the color to white, for starters. And then I'll go ahead and crank the size value up to 10 pixels, and I'll position the strokes outside of the letters like so. Notice that the opacity value is set to 100%. Now, I already have a second stroke just hanging out here. And I'm going to get rid of it just so I can show you how things are going to work on your end. What you want to do assuming you're working in Photoshop CC, is you want to click on the plus icon in order to add a second stroke. And this time around, we're going to set the color to that shade of orange that we used in the previous movie. That is to say we have a hue with 33 degrees, and both the saturation and brightness values are set to 90%. At which point I'll click OK. I'll go ahead and move this guy inside this time around, and then I'll take the size value down to just four pixels. And I will click OK. And you know what? I might have made a tiny mistake here. I'm going to go ahead and double-click on the first stroke in order to bring back the layer style dialogue box. I forgot to change the blend mode once again to Linear Light, so that we're achieving the same effect we got with the skinny letters. And then I'll take the opacity value down to 70%. And what's interesting about this. Note that there is no fill opacity value, there's just standard opacity, but it actually works like the fill value does inside the layers panel. So we get this more interesting interaction between the white strokes and the background. At which point I'll click OK, because I really am done. And that's at least one way to enhance the text in your creepy candy caper composition.

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