Inspired by the cover image of Rich Harrington’s recent post ‘An In-Depth Look at Selling, Budgeting, and Planning Video Projects’ in this tutorial I’ll be looking at how to take text and manipulate it so that it looks like it’s hanging from ropes. I’ll be exploring how to change the text to shapes, moving and rotating them and adding Layer Effects.
The Background
For this example I’ve headed over to my friends at Fotolia to get an image of the lens of a camera. This doesn’t want to be the focal point of this so I made it into a Smart Object and gave it a touch of Gaussian Blur.
The Letters
For the next stage I need the letters to be shapes. I’ve already done a post on how to do this here; Text To Shape in Photoshop
In this example I’m just going to rearrange them using the Direct Selection tool and Ctrl+t (PC / Cmd+t (Mac) to turn them slightly.
I’ll do this to each letter to give them a feel of randomness
The Shape and Colour
Despite me selecting and moving the individual letters Photoshop still sees them all as one shape. In the Layers panel we can see they’re on one layer and opening the Paths panel will reveal just one path. As a whole I can re position my word and I can colour it through the shape options;
In this case I’ve selected one of the Shape Tools (1) then chosen to change it’s colour (2) to a gradient (3), then I’ve chosen a pre made gradient from the list (4)
Adding Definition
To add a little depth to my letters I’ll add a little Bevel and Emboss. To do this I make the Shape layer active then double click next to it’s name;
Choosing Bevel and Emboss I’ll change the settings as follows;
Then click OK
The Hole and its Bevel
Making the hole in the text is a lot easier than it might first appear. To do this I’ll add a reveal all mask to the text layer;
Then, with a small, 100% hardness round brush I’ll click down where I want the hole.
The bevel is added around the mask. This is governed by one small check box that you can find back in the Layer Effects;
In the Blending Options there’s a checkbox, by default it’s off. If this were on now we would get a plain, unlevelled hole, so I’ll leave it unchecked.
Shadow
While we’re in the Layer Styles, lets add a drop shadow.
I’d like the letters to look like they’re quite near the background. This would mean that the shadow is quite well defined and clear, so I’ve kept the Spread at 0. This will all be down to your own taste of course.
The Ropes
The trick here is to add one rope and then duplicate it across. I’ve gone back over to Fotolia and got myself a rope and extracted it from its background using a mask.
Then I’ve dragged it over to the working image and done something counter intuitive, I’ve dragged the mask to the trash can. I get a dialogue box asking what I’d like to do, I’m happy with the mask so I’ll Apply it. This leaves just the rope on the layer.
I’ll receive the rope using Ctl+T (PC) or Cmd+T (Mac) so that it fits in the ‘holes’.
Press Enter to accept the change.
Next add a mask to this layer, this is why I got rid of the last one, and using a black brush again round off the ends to make them look like they go through the hole.
Add a Shadow to the Rope
Just as I did before I’ll add a shadow to the rope, this time it will be at a different angle, so I need to make sure that the Use Global Light in unchecked.
The reason for the change in angle here is so that the shadow doesn’t fall on the lettering too much and suggest that the rope is in front of the lettering. Using the check box ‘Layer Mask Hides Layer Effects’ we could mask them out, but I’ll make it as easy on myself as possible.
Duplicate the ropes
All that remains is for me to duplicate the rope and move it to the next letter. To duplicate press Ctrl+J (PC) or Cmd+J (Mac) and with the Move tool move them into place.
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Filed under: Adobe, Software, Technique & Tutorials Tagged: effect, Eric Renno, Font, Hanging, Layer Effects, layers, Lettering, Photoshop, Text, Text Effect, TipSquirrel 
