Create Glowing Neon Text with GIMP

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this neon text effect using and if you'd like to learn more about how works be sure to check out the series which is a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the major tools and features in and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work I'll put a link in the description if you want to check that out so we'll go ahead and get started here in a the first thing I'm going to do is create a new document I'm gonna go to file and I'm gonna click on new and I want to size this at 1280 by 720 and then go ahead and click OK and I'm just going to zoom out a little bit so I can see the entire image here I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse-wheel once like that and once we've done that I want to fill in this document here with black so as you can see here I have the foreground set to black in the background set to white I'm just gonna go to edit fill with that filled with foreground color or FG color and that's gonna make the background black there and now I'm gonna swap these two around by clicking this double arrow right here so I have the white set as the foreground because I'm gonna use that to create some white text here so I'm gonna grab the text tool and I'm gonna click on the canvas up here in the upper left corner and I'm just gonna create some text I'm just gonna write neon for the sake of this tutorial you could write whatever you'd like obviously and the font I'm using is called Arbitron heavy I'm using it sized at 275 you can change that down here if you click on this you can just go ahead and pick any font you'd like really any font could work with this with this sort of style yeah I would advise against using any kind of thin cursive script fonts because that may not work as well I would recommend a heavy bold sans font like this and the spacing right here I have this set of 23 just put a little bit of space in between those letters you don't want them too close together they don't have to be super spaced apart like that but again you don't want them too close together otherwise the outline we're going to create the letters will touch each other so once we've done that I'm gonna go to layers and I'm gonna click on crop to content and now then I want to Center this up on the page I'm gonna grab the layers tool which is right not the layers the alignment tool which is right here I want to make sure I have the relative to set to image which it should be there by default but you just make sure it is anyway then want to click on the text so I have it selected and then I want to Center it up on the vertical and horizontal axis like that so it's on the center of the page and then I will just click off of the alignment tool to get rid of those outlines I'll click on the move tool and what I want to do now is I want to take the opacity of this layer and just bring this down really low almost like about about two percent right there where you see two somewhere there abouts it's pretty good then I want to right click on that layer that says neon and I want to go to alpha to selection and it's going to create an outline going around the text there and once I've done that I want to click on this button that says create a new layer and add it to the image click on that go ahead and click OK and then go to edit stroke selection and I want to choose for I want to make this four pixels and just go ahead and type in for mine already says 4 because I just did this a few minutes ago before I started recording go ahead and click stroke and then we can go to select none so now we have an outline of our text and what I want to do now is add a layer mask so I'm going to right click on that layer that says outline and I'm going to or the top which whichever is the topmost layer for you and go to add layer mask and I want to choose black full transparency go ahead and click add and it's gonna you're gonna notice the outline disappears there but we're gonna put it back by coloring it in with a white brush so let me click on the paintbrush tool over here keyboard shortcut is P and I want to choose a soft brush like this over here the softest blurry brush that you see and I want to make the size I wanna bring the size down so it's about you're gonna notice an outline on the comic on the on the canvas there around your cursor indicating how big the brushes you can manually change that with your bracket keys or you could just use this slider over here I want to make this about this big so it's in relation to the letter here maybe a quarter of the size of the entire first letter there and once I've done that I just want to go ahead and click on that corner right there and if you're gonna if you notice part of that outline filled back in and I'm going to go through and do this at different random parts of the as you see here through the rest of our text I just want to fill in certain areas not all of it I just want certain areas to be highlighted like that and once we've done that we can go ahead and turn off the visibility of this middle layer here that says neon by clicking the eyeball icon there because we only needed that visible so we could so we knew where to paint and once we've done that we can now fill in the rest of the outline with a lighter treatment so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring the size of this brush up a lot like that and I'm going to take the opacity and bring it down as well maybe down to like 15 and then just go ahead and put the edge of the brush near the letter and click and you'll notice it starts to fill the letters in but not quite as bright as the the highlights we previously created that right there that's what we're looking for right there so let me bring down the size of that brush and bring the opacity back up so that it's at a hundred percent the next time we go to use it and what I want to do now is right click on this layer and go to apply apply layer mask and that's gonna finalize that as it is and I want to create two duplicate copies of this layer right here so I'm gonna click on this button that says create a duplicate and add it to the image I'll click that once and if you notice it created a copy right above it I'll click that again and it's gonna create another copy above that and what I want to do now is I want to click on this middle copy right here and go to filters blur these remind a little bit so you can see this better again to zoom in and out I'm just holding ctrl and rolling up and down the mouse wheel to move to move the page around you can just press down the mouse-wheel and move the mouse around like that I'm gonna go to filters blur Gaussian blur and I'm going to make this a 2.5 it enter 2.5% blur go ahead and click OK and then where it says opacity I want to take the opacity of that and make that 80 and then I'll go down here to the to the layer beneath that and I'll do the same thing only using different values I'll go to filters blur Gaussian blur and I want to make this 5 so hit 5 and hit enter okay and then I want to take the opacity of this and bring this down to 60 so hit 16 hit enter and there we go and as you can see it's starting to take effect here one thing I'd like to do is bring out a little more bring out these highlights a little more so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on this top layer and then I'm gonna click on create a new layer and add it to the image click OK grab the paintbrush tool and I'm gonna make the size of this brush a little bit smaller and let me zoom in on this I just want to go ahead and put I just wanna go ahead and paint right where there's highlights maybe one blotch like that in all of the areas where you have hot maybe not in all of them but most of them I'll put that one there and once I've done that I want to go to mode where it says layer mode and change that to soft light and if you notice what that did is it brought out the highlights on that on that outline a little more if you notice here if you toggle the visibility off and on and what I'm gonna do now is now it's time to add some color to this thing so I'm going to create a new layer again on top of this go ahead and click OK and I want to set the foreground color to a shade of maybe something like a neon pink like that doesn't have to be exactly that whatever color you think looks good go ahead and run with that click OK I'm gonna bring the brush the size of the brush all the way up like that make that really big go ahead and click to create some pink blotches on the canvas there over the text and then I want to change this to I'm gonna go with a shade of blue something like that click OK and add some blue in there as well because I think the pink and the blue really go well to get go well together in the context of a neon effect maybe I'll add another blotch of pink in there there we go and once we've done that I'm going to go to filters blur Gaussian blur I'm gonna bring this all the way up so we have a nice blur a nice smooth blur like that click OK and then what we want to do is where it says mode just change this layer mode to HSL color and if you notice we took the glowing neon text and we added that learn blue and pink color to it and that right there I think you can call it I think you can call it a day right there but one final effect that I added here is the background so I want to bring out the background a little bit I'm gonna click on the background where it's currently black and I'm gonna go to colors curves and I want to take this node over here in the bottom left and just bring that up slightly if you notice the black area is gonna turn gray the more you bring that up the lighter it gets I don't want that let it you want to be up just a little bit so it's a very very dark gray like that and if you notice once you once you bring that up and you add gray you make it gray you're gonna notice some of that neon color spilling into the background there which is pretty much the effect I'm going for if you toggle off that if you toggle the preview off and on you'll notice the difference there and then finally I'll go to the the blue channel over here and I'll and this is completely optional this is just personal preference I'm gonna add a little bit of blue do the same thing with that node right there then I'll go ahead and click OK to finalize that and as you can see we are finished we've created our neon text effect using so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 147,763

Rating: 4.962235 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp neon text, glowing neon text, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: Ap7-CmuE8FA

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019