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Alien Skin Eye Candy 7 This screen shot shows the two kinds of effects you can apply in Eye Candy 7 to a line of text or shape. Each icon has additional choices and controls. Bevel and Chrome seem to have the best features.
This example shows the flat bevel, but you can pick from a variety of profiles and even customize your own. This also shows a letter with a white highlight and black shadows, but you can assign a color for each.
Some of the Texture options are whimsical. For this fur option, I could control the color, pattern (this is Zebra), the length of the fur, and the direction it is blowing. I added the black outline using the FX “stroke” feature.
Eye Candy 7 has a lot of presets, like this Smooth Chrome effect. You can still modify any of the sliders on any preset. I added the thin black outline using the FX layer effects.
Some of Eye Candy’s textures can be applied to a solid shape or panel, or to letters. For the rocks, I could control the color, size of the rocks and thickness of the mortar.
Any of the textures in Eye Candy can be run through additional filters, like the Emboss - Smooth/Rounded filter I applied to the original Rock letter.
You can add outlines with the Stroke option in the FX Layer Effects at the lower left corner of the layer. In this example, I added a large black outline and a thinner white outline. All of the FX options will be available.
Photoshop Text Effects Once loaded, you’ll see a screen in the Layer Styles that looks something like this screen shot. I loaded the Metal, Wood and Fabric effects, but there are also Glass, Stone and many, many more. Click on any of the small icons and it is immediately applied to the current layer.
After picking one of the many Layer Styles, you can tweak any of the settings, such as making the shadow larger, or simply hit the Okay button to apply the style to anything on the layer.
Back in Photoshop, the Layer now has a new list of applied commands. You can double-click on the Effects line to edit all of the effects, or double-click on any of the effects in the list to edit just that one.
These effects take only a few seconds to render. While in Photoshop, the Text layer is fully editable allowing you to change the font size, spelling, font, kerning and so forth. Changes are applied dynamically. The designers at Photoshop Text Effects created over 5,000 effects. I can only show a few in this article, but check out their site for more examples.
Initially, you might think about applying these effects to only letters, but you can also apply them to a panel or shape. I believe there would be some size restrictions on the textures.
In the screen shot of the Layer panel, you can see the small Eye icons in the list of effects. You can turn off any of the effects at any time, which is what I did in this version of the previous example.

Easy bevel and texture effects in Photoshop

Simple tools deliver big results

By Mike Jackson

Posted on Monday, April 25th, 2016

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A lot of beautiful effects can be created in Photoshop using the built-in tools. Some of them require the user to have a fairly good understanding of the program, while others are relatively intuitive if you take only a few minutes to learn through experimentation. There are ever expanding lists of third-party add-ons, plug-ins and filters to make life so much easier and faster. Sure, many of them cost extra money, but if you need their results, the investment can pay off quickly.

Bevel and Texture effects have three or four major uses—at least the way I count them! First, for companies with large-format printers, the effects are simply part of the printed design. Blends, textures, blurs and about anything you can dream up can be printed. Second, you can use texture and bevel effects in a sales drawing to show how a sign might look when later produced in three dimensions.

Bevel and texture effects can also be used for standard print jobs, web graphics and logos. Finally, a hybrid version might include a printed texture effect on the background, with cutout letters and graphics applied over it, or texture effects printed and applied on the surface of the cutout letters and shapes.


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Mike and Darla Jackson operate Golden Studios in Loveland, Colorado, and do a variety of sign-related projects. Mike’s website is www.goldenstudios.com. His email address is golden@goldenstudios.com. You can see more of Mike’s photos at www.tetonimages.com and www.goldenstudios.com.

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