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Tube: Detailing and touchups&BG. (Moderate)

TopHATslash

By TopHATslash
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TopHATslash Grand Master

TopHATslash

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Hello everybody. It has been a while since my latest tutorial.

First off, I would like to address everyone to verndewd's chrome 101 tutorial and verndewd's siggy tutorial. In this he shows you how to make shiny chrome tube caps and then shows how to make a basic tube. In this tutorial, I will be going more in depth with the actual tube and background, rather then the chrome itself.

So once you have read and followed those tutorials to get a feel for designing chrome and designing your sig, then let us begin.

First off, lets place our caps. Be sure to give a good 40 pixels or so around the sig itself and the edge of the workspace. This ensures us to have a good view of our background, which is coming up soon. Also, remember that curves and gradients are your friend. Gradients with a few well placed notches on your curve's luminosity and blending modes will create the most awesome effect. Here are my caps:

tutcaps3.png

(Yes, I know they look dreadfully awful, but I am working on my mom's lap top. Its hard to steady anything without a mouse.)

Now choose a good color for the tube. This can be any color, but keep it not too dark and not too bright. Then grab your rounded rectangle tool and, on a layer below the caps, draw your rectangle. Make sure draw with filled shape is selected.

tutbgcolor.png

Now lets refer back to verndewd's siggy tutorial. Go back to the part where he adds shading to the tube and a (round effect) by using linear reflected gradients with secondary color set to 0 transparency - alpha. Just play with these settings until you are happy. Don't worry too much about the actual tube color/pattern yet. We'll go over that in a sec.

tutbgcolor2.png

Look at the color wheel now and decide on a color either more clockwise around the wheel or counterclockwise. I chose a blue-ish/green so for this color I am choosing now I am choosing a more blue-er blue. Now just use a reflected linear gradients on the center to start giving it a curved look.

tutbgcolor3.png

Now for the next part I added a radial gradient inside the tube with a blending mode to reflect or overlay. I also added a layer and filled it with diagonal lines and lowered the opacity. Finally, I added a cloud layer and played with blend bodes and erased around the tube. Then I added another radial gradient and set it to overlay to bring out the central colors in the tube.

tutbgcolor4.png

Now add some wires using jake2k's wire tutorial.

wired.png

At this point, my caps are very.. irregular. So I used the steps above when making my chrome caps to make an object behind the caps. This would be the connector.

connector.png

Now, again just add some more clouds and gradients to the tube to bring out the energy effect we have going on. Make it look.. dangerous.

energy.png

Save as whatever you wish. Then flatten, but make sure you have a transparent background.

Now make a new layer on the very bottom of your signature. Make sure your colors are set light grey and a tad darker grey. (I will be using #E0E0E0 and #8E8E8E). Make a gradient. Your darker color should be the upper part of the gradient.

gradbg.png

Now, using the rectangle tool, make a dark grey (#404040) rectangle from the bottom up to about an inch above the bottom of the tube caps. (It may be more or less then an inch, but its just to give you a good idea.)

gradbgedge.png

Now duplicate your merged tube layer. Go to layer - flip vertically. Move it to where the top is touching the bottom of the regular tube. Then take your linear gradient tool and set it to :AlphaChannel:. Now hold your left mouse button and drag the notch up so that you achieve the basic Web 2.0 logo effect. Then lower the opacity on this layer until it looks like a good reflection.

reflect.png

Now on your original tube layer again. Grab your magic wand tool. Hold shift and click anywhere on the layer where there are no pixels (click the transparent part). Then hit [ctrl]+. Make a new layer with your selection still active and then fill it with a dark grey (#404040). Then go to Effects-Blurs-Gaussian Blur and blur it from 6 to 10 pixels. You decide. Then move this layer below the other tube layers (even the reflection) and take the top notch and grab it and drag it down. This will virtually compress the grey blur into a shorter but same width blur. Then move it to where it looks like a shadow of the tube and play with opacity.

shadow.png

Now repeat the past couple steps to achieve the same reflection and shadow effect with the text, but use a smaller setting for the gaussian blur on the shadow. Add a nifty border and your done!

final.png

All feedback is welcome. Please let me know if there are any errors or anything. I know my edges are choppy for the caps, but oh well. This could have been easily fixed with feather (from BoltBait's plug in pack) but I was too lazy.

text.png

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TopHATslash Grand Master

TopHATslash

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Because then its a wet floor reflection.

Pipp, flatten your ijmage with transparent background and copy the whole tube and then unflatten and make a new layer then do the reflection. Using a different tube for the reflection doesn't make sense. :P

Also, try messing with the caps. Right now they are very.. basic.

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pipp92 Mentor

pipp92

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Because then its a wet floor reflection.

Pipp, flatten your ijmage with transparent background and copy the whole tube and then unflatten and make a new layer then do the reflection. Using a different tube for the reflection doesn't make sense. :P

Also, try messing with the caps. Right now they are very.. basic.

yeah i know it makes no sense, but hey it was a quick one :P

i know they are basic

but what is this :Dtutcaps3.png

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