Alpha Channels for Plastic Photoshop Text

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing today. It is a program that allows the user to be very hands on with images and manipulate the characteristics of the picture in whatever way they feel is suitable. It gives the user the ability to add specific features only available through the program to their images. Photoshop is also now being used to create images from scratch at a design level. The impact of this is that anyone with a computer is now able to design and create as they see fit. It is no longer reserved to the established and wealthy designers. In this free video series, you will learn how to make text that looks like it is made out of plastic. A professional graphic designer will demonstrate how to use the curves command as well as the alpha channels and text wrap features in Photoshop to make plastic text.

Video Transcript

"Now we are going to continue on with our plastic text. What we are going to do here is we are going to reach up and hold down our command key and go right over our text here and select it like so. Now as you can see we have selected our text here what we are going to do is we are going to come over here into our channels layer and save selection channels that we have used here. So what we are going to do is we are going to use our alpha channel here that we have just created from our selection like so. What we are going to do is we are going to go ahead, let us just go ahead and go to filter and let us go to blur, what we are going to do is we are going to guasian blur this quite a bit. Let us go up to nine, oops, delete that. There we go, what we are going to do is we are going to do that again. Let us go to filter, blur, guasian blur, we are just going to keep on going down the line here, we will do six next. Let us go to filter, blur, do gausian blur, let us go down to three. And let us do one more just for good measure. Filter, blur, let us do guasian blur again and we will take it down to one. There we go, now we have a nice faded edge on our selection here, so let us command D select this or command D to de-select it and there we have it. What we are going to do here is we are going to come back here and touch our plastic text like we have here and we are going to go ahead and add a lighting effect to this. So we will pause here and we will actually do our lighting effect in our next section."