GIMP Text Effects {Nostalgic, Retro Text Design}

hello and welcome to another spectacular retro text effects tutorial my name is chris parker and you're going to love this next text design project so check this out this is the design project you're going to create today how awesome is this when you're done you'll know how to create multiple drop shadows add textures with blending modes and more are you ready to master this text effect awesome let's do it [Music] let's create our new document with commander control and the letter n or go up to file and select new from here for the size set it to 1920 for the width 1080 for the height and then in advanced options set the resolution to 300. as far as the first background color i want to go ahead and choose that so i'm going to click on my foreground color swatch here and i'm going to grab my eyedropper tool because i want to use the same color that i have in this design which is this hexadecimal number so if you want to use the same color just type in this number right here click ok then come down to fill with and select foreground color and click ok next grab your text tool and for this project i'm using a font called thirsty script extra bold and i'm using a size of 250. so if you want to use the same font locate the link for that font in the description below or use your own font i'm going to set the color to white and then i'm going to go ahead and type out the word nostalgic okay hit your escape key to get out of that tool and then you can grab your move tool with the letter m or just grab it from your toolbar i'm just going to move it over just a little bit something like that i'm not worried about it being perfectly in the center of the document what i want to do now though is i want to rotate the text so i'm going to come over here to my toolbar and grab my rotate tool right here the keyboard shortcut for that is shift plus r so i'm going to click right here and begin dragging my mouse to change the angle of the tag so something right there should be good i'm going to click enter or return to commit to that new angle next we need to increase our layer boundary size so we have room to add our drop shadows that we're going to be adding underneath it otherwise it's going to confine those edits or those effects within this layer boundary and it's not going to look very good so let's go up to layer and select layer to image size and that increases the size of that layer boundary to match our canvas all right first step is adding a stroke around our text here so we're going to come over to our layer here and right click on it and select alpha to selection now we do have a tool i'm going to go ahead and zoom in here so we can take a closer look at what's going on here now we do have a tool here under edit to add a stroke to the selection i'm going to go ahead and switch my foreground and background colors here because i want to use this hexadecimal number here for my stroke so if you want to use the same color go ahead and type that in but we're not going to add the stroke via this method i just want to show you why i don't use this method so i'm going to click stroke and i'm going to unselect that and you can see the stroke is there but look how pixelated that is it doesn't look very good at all so i'm going to undo that with command or control and the letter z so there is a better way to do this so let me show you how to do that we're going to go up to select and select grow from here we're going to type how many pixels we're going to grow our selection let's do 3 pixels which is going to match the size that i just showed you once i click ok you're going to notice that the selection is much larger than it was before so now we can come over here and create a new layer i'm going to call it stroke i'm going to fill it with transparency click ok and then we're going to come over here and grab our bucket fill tool and fill it in with that color let's deselect go to select select none or use the keyboard shortcut which is shift plus control plus a and it doesn't look much like a stroke and that's because that layer that we just created is above the text below it let's move it below and boom we now have a stroke that's not as pixelated as the method i showed you previously the other thing is if you're doing this project in a lower resolution like 72 it's going to be much more pixelated than what i'm showing you right now at a resolution of 300 and that's why i like to do text projects at a resolution of 300 in because the text and the effects are much crisper when it comes to graphics and text in general because is a pixel-based software and our graphics are not vector-based like they are in photoshop all right we are now going to come up here and select our text layer here we're going to right click and select new layer group you're going to click on this layer drag it up until there's an outline around it and release and that's placed inside of our layer group and i can turn this layer group off and you can see that it's inside so i'm going to go ahead and drag this one in as well i'm going to double click on the layer name and rename it original so the reason why we're doing this is because we want to work non-destructively as we add additional effects to our text we may decide later on that we don't like the outcome of those effects so instead of starting over from scratch we're going to duplicate our layers to work non-destructively and this is the first step because what we want to do now is duplicate this grouped layer by clicking on this icon right here we don't need this one right now so i'm going to go ahead and turn it off i'm going to right click now and select merge layer group and now both of those layers are merged together let's rename this layer nostalgic and we are now going to duplicate this layer again i'm going to move it below that one and i'm gonna call this shadow one all right i'm gonna go ahead and zoom out here so we can see all our content let's add our first shadow by going up to filters scrolling down to light and shadow and select long shadow and we have our first shadow but we need to make some adjustments to it i want to change the color so i'm going to go ahead and click on this color box right here and i'm going to use this burnt orange color so if you want to use the same color go ahead and type in this hexadecimal number click ok and i want to change the length of the shadow it's too long so i'm going to click right here on length and drag it to the left until i find a length that i like so maybe something like that we're going to go ahead and click ok and now that long shadow is applied to that layer let's duplicate it move it down one rename it shadow two we're going to add another long shadow so filters light and shadow long shadow this time we're going to choose this light orange color here's the hexadecimal number for that and again i want to lower the length i don't want it to be exactly the same as the other one i want to mix it up a little bit so i'm going to go a little bit shorter than previously click ok and guess what we're going to duplicate again lower it and rename it shadow 3. now guess what we're going to do that's right we're going to go back up to light and shadow here long shadow choose a new color i'm going to choose this darker color right here and i'm going to change the length again maybe a little bit longer than the previous one so maybe something like that we're going to do it one more time duplicate move it down and rename let's add another drop shadow this time i'm going to use this color right here and i'm going to make it smaller again so maybe something like that now that we have all our shadows done i realize i don't like this i made a mistake in the beginning this is why we work non-destructively i'm gonna go ahead and turn all these layers off i'm gonna grab this top layer again and duplicate it i'm gonna move it down one and then we're going to go up to filters light and shadow and this time instead of long shadow we're going to select drop shadow from here we're going to select that burnt orange color again let's drop the radius the blur radius down to zero that gives us a hard edge for the drop shadow opacity i want set all the way to the maximum and then i want to change the grow radius so that it grows around the text and then i'm going to change the angle so a little bit of that shadow is around all of the text not just underneath it so right there click ok and then i can continue duplicating and moving these and adjusting the light and shadow for the long shadow for each of those colors so i'm gonna go ahead and do this real quick and then the final step is to add our texture to give it a grunge or old school type of effect so let's grab the texture file that i provided for this project drag and drop it over the document it's automatically going to be added as a new layer let's grab that layer and move it all the way up to the top and let's change the blending mode from normal to let's see screen that looks pretty good a little too intense so i'm going to drop the opacity down to around 19. now the final thing you may want to do is maybe you want to move this layer or this content around the document so to do that you would need to right click and select new layer group and then place each one of those layers inside of the group and then you can move all the content by selecting the layer group grabbing your move tool with the letter m or via the toolbar and you want to make sure your tool options are set to move the active layer so you're not selecting individual layers and then you can move this around the document wherever it needs to be based on your creative vision all right now it's your turn to complete this text design project and to post it in our private facebook group to join our group you can locate the link in the description below also please support my channel by commenting on this video liking it and if you haven't done so already please subscribe don't forget to check out my text effects playlist that has over 20 more tutorials and projects on text effects thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 15,116

Keywords: GIMP Text Effects, gimp text effects tutorial, gimp text shadow, gimp retro text effect, retro text effect in gimp

Id: aMoEMumWrA8

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020