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Photoshop plugins question

Erin

New Member
I'm not that great with photoshop and don't know too much about it really. I'm messing around with the Alien Skin Eye Candy Textures plug in and was wondering how I fill in text with a texture? Can anyone help me?

Thanks
 

gtjet

New Member
In the layers menu, go to layer styles and choose what you want, do this while you are in the text layer you want to apply the style too. In the menu that comes up layers on it, you can click on the first icon on the lower left hand side of that menu box too and it will show the same thing, drop shadows, gradients, patterns, etc. Hope this helps
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Others will have their own "recipes" but here's mine, it seems complicated, but the few clicks can be done in a matter of a few seconds.

First, make a "work path" out of your text layer (go to the layer menu, select "text" and choose "make work path" on the flyout menu). This should make a visible vector path of your text.

Create a new layer, give it the color fill you want. Then apply the Alien Skin texture to it completely.

Open the paths palette. You'll find the text item in there. Grab the pointer tool from the toolbar and select the path as you would in a drawing program. In the paths palette, make a marching ants selection of that text path (either by clicking the little dotted icon at the bottom of the palette or by choosing "make selection" on the flyout menu in that palette).

Go to the select menu and click "inverse". Hit the delete key. That should clear everything out on that layer except for the texture area isolated in that text.
 

gROUND cHUCK

New Member
The way I do it is.
Right click on the text layer and duplicate it.
I say duplicate it so you can change the text later on if need be...
then right click on the duplicate and click on rasterize layer,
then on the raster layer, click "Ctrl-A" and with the arrow keys, click up once and down once.
This will leave the lasso right up against the letters.
Now you can add the Eye Candy filters to it.

the thing about doing it your way Berry is if you want to use the bevel filter
you will bevel the whole frame instead of just the individual objects.
 
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Baz

New Member
I pretty much do it like Barry except that instead of filling the whole layer (the new layer) and cut out the unwanted portions, i select my paths and convert them to a selection (marching ants) at the bottom of the paths menu, then i add my fill color inside.

As far as Barry's method and the use of bevel effects or anyother, they will automatically reset themselves once removal of the unwanted fill area is done (native photoshop filters that is, wont work with 3rd party filters like Eye Candy).
 

gROUND cHUCK

New Member
Yes, when you use the "Blending Options" (when you double click on the layer or you click on the "circle F" on the bottom of the layers panel) the effects will alter to the graphics when you delete the unwanted portions.

But not when you use any of the filters from the filters menu, including most plug-ins. like Artistic, blur, distort, sharpen, sketch, and so on....
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Here's why I prefer to apply a texture effect to a wide area first, and then punch the text out of it later: very often a texture plug-in will screw up along the edges of items like type floating on a transparant layer. Some of Photoshop's own built in plug-in can exhibit that problem.

If you apply something like the Glass filter to that rasterized, floating text object it will sometimes bring in white and black clumps of color on the edges (or color clumps of the current foreground and background colors).
 

Ian Stewart-Koster

Older Greyer Brushie
Thanks for that neat trick with the up & down arrows, Chuck!

Actually I just do it by ctrl-clicking on the layer name in the layers palette- that turns its contents into a selection with marching ants.

If anyone gets tired of the fact that a layer effect gets altered to a new outline after you edit the original item, you can stop that by creating a new blank layer below the existing layer containing the layer style attached to it.
Then type ctrl-E for merge down, and the layer with style will land on the new layer, with they style 'welded' in place and it can then be erased or doctored at will. Of course you can't re-edit the original item unless you preserved a copy of it elsewhere.
 
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