GIMP Tutorial: Molten Lava Text Effect

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'm going to demonstrate how you can create this lava 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 that I created 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 let's go ahead and get started here in game 4 the first thing I want to do is create a new document so I'm gonna go to file new and I'm gonna create a new document sized at night 1920 by 1080 pixels click OK and I'm just gonna zoom out a little bit so I can see the entire document I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse-wheel just to zoom out I want to be able to see the entire canvas and I want to fill the canvas in with black so I'll go to edit fill with foreground color and that's gonna fill it in with black and what I want to do now is just swap around the the black and white here the foreground in the background with this little rotate icon because I want to add some white text now so I'm gonna grab the text tool I'm gonna click on the canvas and I'm just gonna type in lava for the sake of this tutorial you can use whatever font you'd like you may have to adjust the sizing I had my sizing already set because I was previously working with this and once you done once you've done that you can just grab the move tool and put this towards the center of the page what we want to do actually is go to layer crop to content and then we want to grab the alignment tool make sure you have your make sure you have this set to image where it says align set that to image click on the text to activate it and then Center it up on the vertical and horizontal axis like that and now we can grab the move tool just to disable those boxes there what I want to do with this is go to layer layer to image size and then I want to go to I want to right click on this text layer right here and go to alpha to selection and then I want to delete that layer by clicking this little X right here and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a new layer on top of this I'm gonna click the button that says create a new layer and add it to the image click OK and I want to take this selection here and distort it a little bit so I'll go to select distort and these are the presets I want to use right here 127 8 4 & 5 and then both of these checks so go ahead and make sure that yours matches up with this then go ahead and click OK and that's going to distort the outline a little bit and what I'll do now is go to edit edit fill with foreground color and then I'll go to select none and there we have our distorted text so what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna take this layer I'm gonna click and drag this beneath the background layer so it's out of the way and then I'll click on the background layer right here and I want to grab the lava texture I'm gonna put a link in the description to all of the things you'll need in this video you'll need two textures and one brush pack so check the other link in the description grab the lava texture and just place it into click and drag it into like that and what I want to do is I want to take this text layer I want to create a duplicate copy of it I want to bring it on top of the lava texture and then I want to click on the lava texture I want to grab the unified transform tool which is over here what I usually do is press Shift key on the keyboard it's a lot quicker and then you can click on the activate the lava texture right there click on that and then grab one of the boxes over here in the corner click and drag and then hold shift and alt to scale it down like that we want to make it so that the lava texture is just slightly bigger than the text right here but we don't want any of the text sticking out from the from the from the lava texture there so just make sure it's slightly bigger like that press ENTER and then go to layer layer to image size and I'm gonna create a duplicate of that lava layer by clicking this button here and I'm gonna click and drag this beneath the background layer because we're gonna need another copy of that later so what I'll do now is I'll take this lava texture I'm gonna click and drag it to the top I'm gonna layer it on layer it on top like that I'll go to colors saturate bring the saturation all the way down click OK go to colours invert and then I want to make these cracks here a little darker as you can see there are they're they're not quite black they're dark grey I want to make them a little more black so we'll go to colors curves and I'll take this bottom node down here and I'll slide this to the right you'll notice the cracks turning darker as I do that I want to bring it to about there right about there is good I'll go ahead and click OK and what I'll do is the text layer beneath that click on that right-click it and go to alpha to selection and then go ahead and delete that layer we don't need that anymore and now we can click on the lava texture layer go to select invert and then just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of the all of the texture outside of the texture if you're using Mac you'll just have to go to edit and clear as opposed to just pressing delete what we can do now is go to select none and as it stands right now the black area here where the cracks are this is black I don't want that to be black I want that to be transparent so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to colors color alpha and where it says color I'm gonna change this to black click OK and I'm gonna bring up the threshold a little bit you're gonna notice more of the black areas showing through there that's not actually black it's actually transparent which is what we're going for there and we can go ahead and click OK to finalize that and what I'll do next is I'll go to filters blur Gaussian blur we'll use the default here which is 1.5 go ahead and click OK and then we'll go to filters distorts emboss click on that again we'll use the defaults here go ahead and click OK and what I want to do now is take this lava texture bring it to the top and then I want to right click the the text layer at the bottom here right click that and go to alpha a selection come back up here to the lava texture layer go to select invert and then press Delete on the keyboard to delete all of the outside area there then go to select none and what I will do now is click and drag that beneath the other layer that we just created so that this embossed layers on top of it and what I want to do now is click on that top layer the embossed layer I want to set the blend mode to lighten only and then I want to go to colors curves and I want to take this bottom note over here and bring this to the right you'll notice it darkening darkening as I do that and I'll take this note up here and I'll bring this down like that you'll notice as I do that you could see that the the black areas of the lava there are becoming more they're popping out a little more like they have more dimension to them and there's a reflecting light off of them which is this node right here and right up out there that say that's pretty good that's what I'm looking for right there I'll go ahead and click OK to finalize that and what I'll do next is I'll put a little bit of an outline around the text here so I'll right-click on the original text layer down here right-click that go to alpha selection we'll go to select grow I'm gonna grow this by 2 pixels and then I'll go to select feather and I'm gonna feather that by 2 pixels as well and what I'll do is I'll come up here to the background layer select that create a new layer on top of that and I'm gonna grab the gradient tool and the gradient I'm gonna use is I'm gonna look for I believe it's called I forget the name if it I'll know it when I see it there it is crown molding so go ahead and choose crown molding from those presets we want everything else here the same as you see here we want the shape linear that's important everything else should be the same and once we've done that I'm just gonna click and drag through here to create that gradient I'm actually going to hold ctrl on the keyboard so it locks onto the vertical axis like that let go and then go ahead and press Enter to finalize that and go to select none and what I will do next is I want to click on this background layer I want to make this background layer a little lighter so I'll go to colors curves and I'll take this node over here to the left and I'll bring that up slightly so that that background goes from being black to more like a dark grey like that which is what we're going for go ahead and click OK and now I'm gonna click on the layer above that then outline layer that we just created and I'm gonna add a drop shadow I'll go to filters light and shadow and I will choose drop shadow and you'll notice the preview pop up there it's not quite visible I want to make it a little more visible so I'm gonna bring the opacity up I'm gonna give it a little bit of a little bit more blur and maybe I'll set the displacement a little more the offset rather I'll bring that up a little bit as well right about there that looks pretty good I'll go ahead and finalize that I'll click OK and what I want to do next is add a little bit of a glow going around the top edges of the text here so I want to take this text layer down here and I'm gonna duplicate that and bring it to the very top and then I'll duplicate it again and I'll go to colours invert and that's gonna make it black and what I'll do is I'll grab the move tool and I'm going to take this black copy and move this down into the right a little bit so that you see a little bit of white sticking out of the edges there and once you've done that I'm gonna take that very top layer right click that go to alpha to selection go ahead and delete that layer and now once you have this top layer activated you could press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of those areas and go to select none to deselect that and what I will do next is I will go to filters blur Gaussian blur and give this a subtle blur maybe I'll go with four four pixels maybe five and steal five looks yeah that's pretty good I'll set it to five click okay and I will set the blend mode to soft light and I want to be able to see that a little more so I'm gonna duplicate that layer and you'll notice you can see a little more of that effect it looks like it looks like it's popping off the screen a little more so what we'll do next is we're gonna work on the background here so I'm going to click on this background layer to select that and I'm going to grab the other image the other texture that we downloaded it's the scratch steel texture just click and drag that into the canvas here again I'll have a link to all of these elements in the description below and I want to bring the opacity of that layer down a little bit and then I want to create a new layer on top of that so I'm gonna click the button that says create a new layer and add it to the image I'm going to flip the colors back around here so that black is the foreground I'm gonna grab the gradient tool again only I'm going to set the presets to I want to use foreground to transparency as you can see here so what our foreground color set the black you're gonna see in the preview icon here it's foreground to transparency and I'll start down here and I'll just bring this up like that hold control lock it onto the vertical axis so that we have a gradient going from black to transparent like that press + to run the keyboard to finalize that and you might want to come back over here to your scratch steel layer and adjust the opacity accordingly we want to be able we don't want too much of this of the texture showing through up here we want it to be subtle but at the same time you want to be able to see some of this drop shadow down here so if I break it down too much you're not really seeing much of the drop shadow at the bottom so I'm gonna bring it I'm gonna find a nice happy medium right about may be right about there is pretty good and what we will do next is let me click on the very top layer I'm gonna add a new layer to the image and I'm going to swipe a swatch swap these two colors back around again and I'm gonna grab the paintbrush tool and I'm going to grab the smoke brushes over here one of these smoke brushes I'm gonna use brush number 19 you can use any smoke brush you like this step is optional you really don't need to do this if you don't want to this is just to add a nice finishing touch to the design here I again I'll have a link in the video of the description where you could download these smoke brushes if you don't have them installed already and let me just zoom out a little bit and I'm just gonna add I'm gonna add a touch of smoke right there and I'm gonna add a different grab a different brush I'm gonna add a little bit of smoke right there as well and what I will do now is let me get rid of the let me grab the move tool I'm gonna take this layer and set the blend mode to overlay and it's gonna give that a nice subtle smoke sort of look and yeah that's that's what I'm going for right there so I think right here we're pretty much done there's just one final step which is what I did to make the thumbnail look as look it looks like it just pops a little more than what we have currently what I did was I right click this and go to new from visible and I just the color curves and the levels a little bit so to do that I go to colors curves and what I did was I took this node down here and I bring this up a little bit and then I create another stop right here and just bend that line down a little bit like that and if you toggle off the preview you can see the difference there it just makes it look a little more uniform it just gives it a nice polished look let me go to the blue Channel I'm gonna add some blue to it by bringing this up as well you notice it's a little bit of a blue tint going into the steel there which adds a nice effect and then I will go to the red channel and I will slide this top one over to the left a little bit just to if you notice the the lava in the text there it just it just makes it glow a little more but you don't want to get you don't want to get too carried away with it maybe right about just very subtly this is the trick so I'll bring it right about there go ahead and click OK and then I will go to colors levels and I'll just make the whole thing pop a little more by taking this stop bringing it over a little bit then I'll take this stop bring this over a little bit as well and you can just adjust this to taste whatever you think looks good I think right about there looks good I'll go ahead and click OK to finalize that and it's this is just an entire visible layer here you can toggle this off and on to see the difference if you notice here this is what we previously had and what is with these new color adjustments I just think it gives it a nice polished look so I think that should do it for this tutorial so you can go about creating that molten lava text effect using if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 21,879

Keywords: gimp tutorial, gimp molten lava, gimp lava text, molten lava text effect, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: yNDtdNMS-hs

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019