What's the best way to do opening crawls?

[millenniumf]

I'm trying to create my own Star Wars comic, and of course, being the traditionalist that I am, I wanted to start it out with an opening crawl.

The problem here is that I need a way to 'tilt' the image of the block of text so that it resembles the opening crawls from the movies. I've tried a few ways, but I can't find anything that does what I want it to do. I thought about 'pinching' the top section, but the selection tool doesn't have this function and I can't find anything in the tools to create this effect.

Am I going to have to import the text into a modeling program, tilt it, and render it as a 3D object?

[delpart]

No, that fading text can be done. Not sure what you've tried though to more than broad stroke recommend some plugins ...

Quadrilateral Reshape and Perspective plugins should help here. Plus layer titling depending.

Quad is in Evan's package: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/13003-evans-effects-v18-january-6-2012/

Perspective is in DPY's pacakge: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/16643-dpys-pack/

[millenniumf]

Thank you! I am not new to PDN, but I have never downloaded plugins because I didn't know any existed. I'll try them out.

[delpart]

You're welcome. Plugins will extend your abilities. Especially since some of them are merely upgrades for basic functions in several cases ... Curves+, etc.

Perspective in Vertical Trapezoid mode looks like it should work well enough to match the angle from the films ... text gets a little distorted. Have to consider this some ... Plus potentially working on a larger canvas and reducing it as any time you start to tilt things you need more space ... this example the text was from about quarter the way down to the bottom of that frame ...

Example:

Edited February 21, 2012 by delpart

[pdnnoob]

Another option is to use the rotate/zoom function (Layer>Rotate/Zoom) built into paint.net.

If you do decide to do it this way, you will want to stretch the text vertically or squeeze it horizontally first. That said, you may have to do it in a new image (make the canvas size about twice as tall as it needs to be).