Cutout/Layered Text with Shadow

[Ekstaze]

This tutorial is available as a PDF. Click here to view or download it

 

 

Edit: Just saw pdnnoob's tutorial and St.Jim's tutorial (sorry didn't realize there were other tutorials for this). So sorry! You can lock this.

 

 

 

I'm going to show how to make cutout or layered text with a drop shadow.

 

We're going for something like this:

 

 

 

 

Required Plugins:

- Outline Object by pyrochild

 

Tutorial:

 

1) Open up a canvas that your text can fit in. For this, I chose 800x300.

 

2) Put in whatever you want to be the background. I used a gradient but a picture or anything else works fine.

 

3) Create a new layer and put your text in.

 

3) Hold shift and click on your text with the magic wand.

 

4) Go to the layer with the background (have the text area still selected) and cut (ctrl+x). It should look like this if the text layer is not visible.

 

5) Move the layer with the text down below the background.

 

6) Blur the text layer with Gaussian Blur. The bigger the radius of the blur, the more prominent the shadow will be.

 

7) Use pyrochild's Outline Object plugin to outline the text. You should outline it with black/dark gray. Make sure the width is enough that there are no white pixels outside of it.

 

😎 Flatten (ctrl+shift+f) and there you go! You can add glow or tailor it to your own needs to make it look better.

 

Read SAND33P's reply for some awesome ways to spiff it up.

 

Thanks for reading!

[SAND33P]

Nice effect, there are probably more elegant ways of doing this but its a good tut for a newbie to learn a few skills.

I rendered Outline Selection above the text layer, and keeping the selection, Gaussian Blur, then lowered the opacity. Font is Bebas Neue.

 

A nifty little thing to do in between step 6 - 7, render Jitter on these or similar settings:

 

 

Fiddle with the opacity of the layer and it looks great!

I changed the colour myself, Jitter doesn't do any magic colour shifting, although that has just given me an idea,,,

 

Here i used the Rainbow Twist effect with my first method, followed by Jitter on the same settings. The blurred outline layer is set to Overlay.

I think the L looks quite cool.

I seem to have got rather carried away there, excellent tutorial Ekstaze!

Edited December 25, 2012 by SAND33P

[Ekstaze]

Thanks for the additions! Never would've thought of that. 

[DrewDale]

Interesting beginners tute, you would be best using AA's Assistant on the background layer before you do step 5 to remove the jaggies. Also to prevent this tute being locked you will need to re-size your images on here  

[Ego Eram Reputo]

@Ekstaze: Please resize the images so that their maximum dimension is 800 pixels or less (as per the Tutorial Posting Guidelines)

[CindyGiveawayForPiggUser]

attemp XXDD

[Son of Spam]

Ekstaze, what was the font you used for the "PDN" lettering?

[Son of Spam]

Nevermind!  I zoomed in on your image and discovered it's Coalition. 

 

I downloaded Coalition from Dafont and installed it in my Fonts folder under Windows.  But it's not showing up when I load PDN. 

 

What do I need to do?

[Son of Spam]

And nevermind THAT!  I just found the thread, lol!  Sorry for my lack of presence, folks!

[Ego Eram Reputo]

<Closed due to authors inability to comply with image size request>