Seminars and Workshop

January 28, 2010

·  - New file: 900 x 900px. Black Background.
- add three text-layers: “The” “ULTIMATE” “Source”.
- Take a very bold font, that gives us a better look.
- “The” and “Source” should have a size of 35, “ULTIMATE” has a size of 55px.
- Move the 3 text-layers together (as seen on the picture below).

Click to enlarge

·  2

Merge these 3 layers. To do this select (in the layers-dialog) the text-layer thats on top of all the text-layers. Right-mouse-click and choose “Merge Down”. Repeat once.

Now the whole text should be on a single layer.
Move the Text to the very center of the picture. To do this you can either use the Alignement-Tool or just use guides. Go to Image / Guides / New Guide: Choose horizontal: 450px - then click OK, same again with a vertical guide. Move the text-layers “M” (from the “ultiMate”) to the point where the guides are crossing.

Go to View / Show guides (Deselect).

Now go to Layer / Layer to Image Size. Duplicate this layer. Now merge the layer thats above the Background-layer down with the Background-layer.

Name that text-layer “Source” and the Background-layer “Strahlen” (which is the german word for “rays”).

Click the Eye-Icon for the “Source”-layer in the layers-dialog to make it invisible. After this long step your layers should look like this:

·  - New file: 900 x 900px. Black Background.
- add three text-layers: “The” “ULTIMATE” “Source”.
- Take a very bold font, that gives us a better look.
- “The” and “Source” should have a size of 35, “ULTIMATE” has a size of 55px.
- Move the 3 text-layers together (as seen on the picture below).

Click to enlarge

·  2

Merge these 3 layers. To do this select (in the layers-dialog) the text-layer thats on top of all the text-layers. Right-mouse-click and choose “Merge Down”. Repeat once.

Now the whole text should be on a single layer.
Move the Text to the very center of the picture. To do this you can either use the Alignement-Tool or just use guides. Go to Image / Guides / New Guide: Choose horizontal: 450px - then click OK, same again with a vertical guide. Move the text-layers “M” (from the “ultiMate”) to the point where the guides are crossing.

Go to View / Show guides (Deselect).

Now go to Layer / Layer to Image Size. Duplicate this layer. Now merge the layer thats above the Background-layer down with the Background-layer.

Name that text-layer “Source” and the Background-layer “Strahlen” (which is the german word for “rays”).

Click the Eye-Icon for the “Source”-layer in the layers-dialog to make it invisible. After this long step your layers should look like this:

Click to enlarge

·  3

- Make sure that the “Strahlen”-Ebene is active.
- Go to Filter / Distorts / Polar coordinates and take the values from the picture below.

Click to enlarge

·  4

Go to Image / Transform / Rotate 90° clockwise

Click to enlarge

·  5

Go to Filter / Distorts / Wind and choose the options from the picture below.

Click to enlarge

·  6

Repeat the filter once but now choose “Left” as direction, the other options remain unchanged.

Go to Image / Transform / Rotate 90° counter-clockwise. After that apply the polar-coordinates filter again. Click the “To Polar”-option. The text should look like this now.

Click to enlarge

·  7

Choose the Rectangle-Select-Tool and draw a selection around the rays.

- Select / Invert.
- Choose black as FG-color.
- After that: Edit / Fill FG-color.
- Select / None.

Click to enlarge

·  8

The rays look pretty bad… To change this go to Filter / Blur / Motion Blur and choose the values from the image below:

Click to enlarge

·  9

Click the Source-layer in the layers-dialog and choose “Alpha to Selection”. Create a new layer, name it “Glühen” (german word for glow). Activate the created layer.

- Select / Grow: 2px
- Fill the selection with white.
- Press CTRL+SHIFT+A to deactivate the selection
- Filter / Blur / Gaussian: 10px
- Choose “Screen” as layermode (you can find the layer modes dropdown-menu in the layers-dialog above the transparency-control.

Click to enlarge

·  10

- Move this layer between “Source” and “Strahlen”, in case it is not already there.
- Click the Eye-Icon of the “Source”-layer to make it visible. Go to Colors / Invert. (in Gimp 2.2 this option is under Layer / Colors / Invert).

Click to enlarge

·  11

Choose the “Strahlen”-layer and go to (Layer /) Colors / Color Balance

For a blue shine take these values:
————————————
Shadow 0 | +30 | +40
Midtones: -70 | -35 | +30
Highlights:-85 | -25 | -50

For a gold shine:
———————————
Shadows 100 | +50 | -50
Midtones: +70 | -30 | -100
Highlights: +20 | 0 | -50

Done

Tip: If you want your rays to shine even more, duplicate the “strahlen”-layer, blur it with gaussian blur and set the layers mode to “Screen”.

Click to enlarge