In this tutorial I will be using PSP 7 and Flaming Pear's Bladepro Plugin.
Don't have blade pro - CLick here for download and install information.
Create a new image in psp about 300 x 300 pixels, 16 million colors and transparent.
Click on text (A button) and set the forward and background colors to black and white as in the image above.
Note: if you select the colors first they will change to defaults or last used text colors.
Be sure to select the line width of your text to around 6 (adjust this to make thinner or thicker text edges to your liking).
Be sure to chose a font that has a great deal of width to it. Here I am using Caligula (my favorite font) and I have set the font size to 72 and adjusted the leading to give me area between the letters.
You can change the color or style fills for your text while in the text box.
This is something you can play with later for now just leave it as is.
Now use the magic wand
to select the black lines around the letters.
Do a Selection, Modify, Expand of one pixel (see images below)
or Effects/Plugins/FlamingPear/Bladepro
and let the software open.
I am using Primus in this tutorial
but either software does a great job.
Chose the preset that you want to use for the outer edge. I chose gold (see below)
Now for another way to select areas. We are going to work with the white area of the text. You could select each area, but that can be time consuming. So select one area. See image below
Now do a Selection, Modify, Select Similar.See image to the left.
And the results in the image to the right.
Now you go back to effect, and click on Primus (it will be in your menu list - PSP places the last plugin that you used in the effects list for you).
I selected a soft blue glass fill for my text
Next we will add a little drop shadow to the text
I do this by selecting anywhere in the background area,
Then do a Selection, Invert and your text will be selected. See image above.
Go to Effect/3D and select drop shadow.
The drop shadow box will open.
See image below
You can move the sliders and even select the color of your shadow.
This will take some experimenting on your part but for now you can use the settings illustrated.
Now for the most important step. CROPPING AND SAVING YOUR IMAGE!
Use the crop tool to select the area close to your text.
Cropping will decrease the size of your image and thus increase the speed of the image load on the internet.
Use the file export feature to save your file.You can export a jpeg or gif.
Jpeg will do a better job as illustrated in the image to the right.
I exported my image, used the PSP wizard
and selected best quality for the gif
and about a 80% quality for the jpeg and the difference is amazing.
The gif is 7907 bytes and the jpeg is only 6167 bytes.
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I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Please feel free to contact me with any thoughts for improving it. Email Me Page Updated December 2, 2002.
If you liked this tutorial, try one of my other tutorials . You can find sites with great bladepro presets, tubes, frames, etc on my psp quick links pages .
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