Digital Image: Heart of Gold

Seeing that I'm still in love with this theme, I post an image with similar vibe as the one I posted weeks ago. Shabby Victorian feel is a little addictive, like caffeine. This full photoshop-generated image is an expression of love. Well, of course, what with the heart and flower, can it express anything else? So ....

Background. Simple brush downloaded from Brusheezy, under the floral category. Or maybe swirly? Just click the brush anywhere you like. Even random clicks may get you a nice picture. What I did here was tampering with corner only. Try this: put swirls around the corner, duplicate layer, move to opposite corner, then flip horizontal. If you want the same pattern for each corner, just merge the two layers, duplicate it, move to opposite side, then flip vertical and merge the two layers.

Texture. This, I like. Because it's easy and can alter the whole appearance of an image. Create new layer, fill with color (I used BEAD90). Add noise and apply motion blur. You'll get a layer full of scratch lines. Duplicate the layer and rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Change blend mode of top layer to soft light. It will now look like a cross-hatched canvass. Merge the two texture layers and reduce opacity until you can see the background swirls.

Heart. Pick the heart shape from free shape, make path as selection, then make a stroke using black. Get the floral brush again and click randomly inside the heart. After you're done, tidy up the image a little. Erase any swirl that crosses over the outline.
Now we hit layer style. Apply drop shadow and bevel. Choose a smooth inner bevel and ring for the curve. Experiment with depth, size, and soften. Apply color overlay because we don't want a black heart. In this image, I use gold color (ffc900 or so). It's done. Looking nice and shiny. Everything a girl likes.

Digital Image: Badz (Text Effect)

For once, I wanted to do something about text. Simple font like Arial can look cool too. My first thought was to make the text looked like zooming fast. By using a couple of filters, this can be done. Before doing anything, we needed to make sure the canvass was a perfect square, because there would be a lot of rotating. Less than perfect square would make the end result a little weird.

First I typed a short word with Arial Black. Then I duplicated the layer and filled the duplicated layer with white on multiply blending option. I blurred it a little with 2 pixels Gaussian. At this stage, the text would look rather plain.

How to make it not so plain. Hit filter, find distort and find polar coordinate. Check the option polar to rectangular. See the difference? Rotate it 90 clockwise. Hit another filter. This time, it's stylize, the wind effect. Make sure to pick wind method and direction from left. Do this twice, then we'll have a bunch of scratch marks. Then hit Ctrl+I to invert the color. Do the windy twice, again. We'll have a blackboard with white scratches. That's fine. Rotate it 90 counter clockwise. Still not getting it, eh? Try the previous filter, polar coordinate. Pick rectangular to polar option. Now we're getting somewhere. For this layer, choose hard light for blending option. Adjust hue/saturation as you like. See? A lot cooler than simple type.

If it's still not enough, make another layer. Fill with white and add 100% Gaussian monochrome noise. Use motion blur with direction 90 degrees, and distance 200 pixels. Hit polar coordinate again and choose rectangular to polar. Again, pick hard light blending mode. See?
Oh, but text becomes unclear. We need to add layer mask on this and brush the areas we want to make clear with black. If the zoom lines is too strong for your taste, just reduce the opacity of the layer. Done.