Adding texture to Bevel and Emboss

In this movie we're going to take the word Spiders, which looks like it might have been carved out of wood, and we're going to transform it to this kind of chain metal type. And we'll do so by adjusting a few setting of course, as well as adding a texture to our bevel and emboss effect. I'll go and switch back to the image at hand and zoom in on it until we get to the 100% zoom ratio. The first thing we need to do is to imbue our letters with a little bit of blue. And so I'm going to drop down to the FX icon, and choose colour overlay, which allows you to paint a layer with the solid colour.

By default it's set to paint your layer red, so it just completely replaces the contents of the layer which obviously is not something we want. I'll click on the colour swatch in order to bring up the colour picker dialogue box. And the colour I came up with is this one here, a hue of 215, saturation 20%, and brightness 70%. Click OK. That's still not what we want, because we don't want to just whole hog replace the colours. So I'll go up here to the blend mode and change it from normal to colour.

So that we're colourizing the background. And then I'm going to reduce the opacity to 50%, because we just want a hint of blue, like so. Now I'm going to drop down to the drop shadow there. I'm going to reset its blend mode to multiply, and I'm going to increase its opacity value back up to 100%. Which makes it a little more consistent with the type that's actually casting the shadow. Now I'll switch to bevel and emboss. And these are just some settings I came up with that seem to work well for this effect.

For starters, just so we can keep track of what we're doing, I'm going to switch the gloss contour back to linear. We'll change it to something else in a moment but linear will work for now. And I'm going to change the colour of the highlight mode to 215 once again. So if you're working along with me you just need to change the hue value and same for the shadow colour. We'll go ahead and change it to 215 as well, and then click OK. I decided to take the opacity value for the highlight mode up to 100%. Next I'll take the size value down just a little bit, so I'm taking it down to 30, then I'm going to take the soften value down to zero for now.

And we'll get this really, really sharp effect as you can see, and then I'll go ahead and take the depth value up to 200%. Now I'll click on the texture option to both select it, and turn it on. By default you don't have many patterns to choose from in order to set your texture. You've got bubbles, and then you've got tie-dye, which is absolutely useless for this purpose, and a few others as well. This final one, grey granite, is the one that initially popped up for me. To load some more useful patterns, go ahead and click on this little gear icon.

And choose patterns from the pop up menu. And you'll be asked if you want to append these patterns or just go ahead and replace the ones that are there. You can do either, if you append though you are going to repeat some patterns. So I'm going to click OK. Now notice some new patterns that we have, like cells, this one's metallic snake skin, molecular actually its a. Looking pretty darn great. What's happening right now is Photoshop is lighting the surface, as if everything white in the texture is raised and everything black is sunken.

If you want to switch that then you can turn on the Invert check box, and you'll end up getting the opposite effect and, actually, now white is forward. And black is sunken because back here in the bevel and emboss section, we've got the direction set to down. So, if you wanted to switch things to the way they're supposed to be, then you would select up instead. Anyway, I'm going to leave it set to down, and return back to my texture, and turn off the Invert check-box, because the one I'm really looking for Is this guy right there. It's called strings.

So go ahead and select that one, and you'll see a series of strings being woven through the letters. I want it to be bigger, so, I'm going to scale this guy up to 250%. What I'm doing is pressing Shift+up arrow, and previewing how things look on screen. And then I'm going to take that depth value way down. I'll take it down to about 20%. Now I'll switch back to bevel and emboss. And the soften value that I restored to zero pixels, it not only affects the chiselled, hard edges, but it also affects these edges that are associated with a pattern.

And because we're up-sampling the pattern, we're starting to get some jagged edges there. So I'm going to press the up arrow in order to raise that value until some of those jagged edges go away. And then, finally, I do want a gloss contour because here's where something like gloss contour really comes in handy. I want this to have more of a metallic feel to it. And so, I want to breathe some life into these shadows, and darken up these middle areas a little bit, but it's in the surface of the letters. I'm going to click on this graph icon in order to bring up the contour editor, and I'm just going to start moving some points around here, and then I'll show you exactly where the points go.

And the idea is I want to make the shadows bright, I want to make the highlights bright. I want to sink the mid-tones a little bit, and so we're going to start with this point right there, and I'm just going to dial in some values. You can see that this point is selected. I just clicked on it, and the input value is 0%. I'm going to change the output value to 90%. And then I'll press the Plus key to advance to the next point. And I'm going to change the input value this time to 20%, and I'll change the output value to 15%.

And I'm pressing tab to advance to corner before I press Plus, in order to select the next point. And now, I'm going to change the input value to 40, and I'll change the output value to zero, to go ahead and send that point to the bottom of the graph. And I'll press the Plus key to advance to the next point, and I'll change its input value to 70. And I'll change it's output value to 35, and we end up achieving this effect here. Now, if you like this contour, and you think you'll be using it a lot, then you could go ahead and click the new button.

And call it something like valley because that's the shape of the contours, not always, by the way, going to deliver a metallic effect. Now click OK, and click OK again in order to accept my changes. I'll go ahead and click the OK button in order to accept my modifications, and I'll press Ctrl+0, or Cmd+0 on a Mac. In order to zoom out from the image. Now I'm really liking this effect, but obviously it shouldn't be applied to the word spiders, and so I'll double-click on that t in order to select the word and then replace it with a better one.

And now I'll press the enter key on the numerical keypad in order to accept that change, and I'll press the t key in order to switch to my time tool. Now I'll click on the type size icon and change it to a 152 points. Then grab the marquee tool and select between the two seams right there, so and switch to the move tool and click on the align vertical center icon. Then press Ctrl+ D, Cmd+D on the Mac in order to deselect the image, press the T again and you switch to the type tool. And I'll select this word right there, and replace it as well.

And that is my final effect folks. I'm going to press Shift+F to switch to the full screen mode, and then zoom in. And that folks is how you use layer effects to achieve outstanding imagery, here inside Photoshop.