Grungy LIVE-TYPE Chrome in Photoshop OR After Effects!

hey everyone brady from texturelabs.org here i've been working on some grungy chrome text loosely inspired by my teapot it's got live text it's got some subtle reflections in here the question was do i build it in photoshop do i build it in after effects but i figured it'd be a fun experiment to do both so in this video i'm going to run through the process at the same time in both photoshop and after effects as two completely separate projects i think there are some interesting things we can learn from working in both programs if you're not an after effects user but you want to learn more about it this might be a nice way to see some of the extra features after effects has to offer if you're more of an after effects user and photoshop's just sitting on your computer gathering dust there might be a few surprises some cool photoshop techniques that very rarely get used in after effects but they can open up some cool possibilities let's get into photoshop and after effects and get started all right i'm going to get started in photoshop with a fairly large document 3840x2160 4k resolution with a black background this effect will preserve a transparent background but we'll make it black for now and i'm going to work at 16 bit that's going to allow me to really push some of the color values and minimize artifacts then i'll get some type in here the font is called schluber which is actually mad max's name in the first draft of the script what i need is for the color of the text to be 50 gray and without ruining the suspense i'm going to quickly illustrate how this effect is going to work i'm going to create the typography as kind of this matte surface all in grayscale and then use a gradient map or at least in photoshop it'll be a gradient map to completely remap the colors and create this illusion of reflections so i've got 50 gray text and i'm going to apply the bevel and emboss effect to give it some dimension i'll crank up the depth to 200 to bring out the effect a little bit more bring the size up to 10 pixels and i'm also just going to shift the light angle to come from 80 degrees just a little bit off center none of this is set in stone we can always come back and revisit these settings the bevel and emboss created some highlights and shadows on the edges i'm gonna use one more effect the inner shadow effect to get a little bit of variation in the gray values on the faces of the letters i'm going to take the distance to 0 bring the size up to about 35 and the opacity up just a bit to 50 percent so those are the effects let's take a look at how to replicate this so far in after effects new project here i need to create a new composition and i'm going to use this 4k preset which is also 3840x2160 and has this kind of odd standard of 23.976 frames per second i'm also going to set the background to black here and hit ok and i do want this project to also be 16-bit that's not in the composition settings that's a project-wide setting here at the bottom of the project panel with an alt-click or an option click you can cycle through 8-bit 16-bit 32-bit so i'll leave that at 16 and there's one difference to note right out of the gate here i've got a black background in this composition but that doesn't mean quite the same thing as it does in photoshop there's not actually a black solid layer here the black is just for preview purposes at the moment i can toggle it on and off in after effects i want to keep it this way i'm just going to put the same text layer in here also in 50 gray and as we move forward i'll point out why i want a transparent background in this project as opposed to the black background in photoshop but i do have this preview black background which is nice so to recreate that bevel and emboss effect on the text i've got to admit i worked for many many years in after effects without ever realizing you have access to all those same photoshop layer style effects bevel and emboss outer glow all the rest of them right here in the program they're just really kind of hidden the trick is that they're not under the effects menu they are under the layer menu down here under layer styles you've got drop shadow inner shadow and you can select an individual effect or i'm just going to select show all and that gives us a whole new layer style section down here in the timeline if you're new to after effects i should point out that in all the after effects projects i've opened and worked with over the years i've never opened one that was using layer style effects maybe that's just the circles i run in but i just don't want to give the impression that this is the standard approach in after effects generally you're going to be working more in the effects menu but these layer styles can be very very useful especially if you have kind of an arsenal of techniques in photoshop that you want to recreate so let's turn on bevel and emboss and you've got pretty much all the same options as you do in photoshop it's a little bit more abbreviated but i'm just going to put in those same values a depth of 200 a size of 10 with the light angle at 80 degrees and it looks like after effects sets the default opacity of the shadows and highlights to 75 while photoshop sets them at 50 so let's take those back to 50 percent that's the bevel and emboss i'm also going to turn on the inner shadow and match those settings with the opacity at 50 percent distance at 0 and size at 35. and we have matched our settings so far in after effects let's get back to photoshop next thing i want to do here is to take this text layer and drag it into a group folder what that does is to isolate this bevel and emboss and the shadow effect so that as we stack things on top those effects will only ever affect this text layer i'm going to create a new empty layer i want to be sure this doesn't go in the group folder so i've got to drag that out of there i'm going to call this layer gradient then i'll hit g for the gradient tool d to set the colors to default black and white and drag out a gradient from bottom to top that basically covers the size of the letters then to get the gradient to live just within the shapes of the letters i'm going to hold the alt or the option key and click in between the gradient layer and the group folder to create a clipping mask i'm going to set the blending mode of the gradient layer to overlay and bring the opacity back to 60 let's check out the equivalent in after effects i'm going to create a new solid doesn't matter what color it is but i'll hit make comp size and that of course will create a solid that matches the size of the composition i'll rename this layer and call it gradient then under the effects menu i can use generate gradient ramp and the gradient's the wrong way around so i'll hit swap colors then i'm going to set this layer's blending mode to overlay bring the opacity back to 60 percent and i can drag the start and end points of the gradient effect to kind of match the tops and bottoms of the letters then in photoshop i used a clipping mask to get the gradient layer to live inside of the letters in after effects we don't actually have a thing called a clipping mask but there are many many more ways to control the transparency or the alpha channel of different layers you've got this little preserved transparency checkbox you've got track mattes very useful tools in this project i'm going to end up with this gradient layer plus a few other layers all of which i want to live within the shapes of the letters so the solution i'm going to use here is to create a new solid i'll make it a bright color just to give it kind of a visual label i'm going to call this layer knockout and i'm going to use an effect in the channel section the set matte effect then i'm going to point that effect at the mad max text and that takes the alpha channel from that text layer which is pretty useful then i'm going to set this layer to a blending mode that we actually don't have in photoshop it's the stencil alpha blending mode and that makes this layer almost into a mask that lives on top of everything you can also see now why i didn't create a background layer because this knockout layer would have just hidden the whole thing anyways all right back in photoshop and next up i want to get just a little bit of texture in here i'm going to drag in a grungy texture just a small amount of that natural randomness is going to help give this some life i'm also going to include this in the clipping mask with an alt click and i'm going to set it to overlay blending mode i'll include a link to this texture but whether it's this one or a different texture the important thing is that the image i'm using is on average really a 50 gray image meaning that when i'm using a contrast blending mode like overlay even if this was a heavier blending mode like hard light it's not going to push the overall value of the artwork lighter or darker it's going to do a little bit of both so the areas of this image that are 50 gray won't do anything then the darker areas will push things a little bit darker lighter areas will push things a little bit lighter either way i do want this to be really subtle so i'm going to bring the opacity down to just 10 percent all right same thing in after effects i've imported this texture i'm going to drag it into the composition and scale it down and i do want to put it underneath that knockout layer then set it to overlay mode and bring the opacity down to ten percent all right we'll jump back over to photoshop and next up is where this really starts to come to life and that is with a gradient map adjustment layer i'm also going to include the gradient map in the clipping mask then i'll click the gradient to customize it and this adjustment layer is going to remap all of your colors with whatever you put in this gradient and the idea is to create a spectrum of colors here that includes kind of these unexpected shifts from dark to light with some slightly different color values and that starts to create the illusion of reflections rather than highlights and shadows now the truth is this is looking kind of chaotic and the best way to create these gradients is to find some real source imagery of chrome or whatever it is you're trying to create and sample some real colors it does take a fair amount of time to kind of dial it in and get a look that you like so i won't attempt to do it in real time here but what i'll do is just pull up a preset that i've created that i'll share with you guys and you'll notice that this gradient doesn't actually look like a finished set of colors to create that chrome effect partly because there's this big chunk of black in here creating this kind of dead space at the top of the letters in a real reflection that's maybe where you would see the sky or the brightest colors but i did create the gradient like this for a reason i'm going to hit ok and apply this gradient and this adjustment layer is only half the puzzle to create the chrome reflections so we'll get there shortly but first we're going to have to figure out how to apply a gradient map in after effects which is not so easy there is no gradient map adjustment layer or gradient map effect in after effects i should mention there's an effect called colorama which technically is kind of the same as gradient map but it runs in a circle and honestly i just find it really tough to work with however there is an interesting workaround to create a gradient map adjustment layer in after effects a way of exporting a gradient map from photoshop but we need to export it as a lut or a color lookup table which works like this i need to create a new document with just a background layer then i'm going to drag this gradient map adjustment layer in here then go to file export color lookup tables the default settings are fine here and we don't need all four of these different formats a cube file is probably the most commonly used lut file so i'll hit ok give it a name i'll call this grungy chrome then in after effects i'm going to create a new adjustment layer then under effects in the utility section it's the first effect apply color lut and i'll select that file and there we go we have our gradient map as a lut adjustment layer and i'll also put this adjustment layer under the knockout layer i'll also include a link to this lut file unfortunately in after effects you can't edit the lut or the gradient map so if you want to build your own gradient map or make adjustments to it you really do have to do that in photoshop and then export it as a lut okay back in photoshop to address this big dark blob in the chrome colors and actually all this black up here is kind of like a placeholder for where i want some reflections of a cloudy sky so i'm going to drag in an image with some nice moody clouds and i will also include this in the clipping mask and actually i'm going to transform this and just flip it around and maybe squish it down a little bit i just want to get those more colorful clouds at the top then i'm going to double click on the layer to bring up the blending options and in the blend if section for the underlying layer i'm going to drag the white slider down quite a bit and that'll knock out the areas of this layer where there are lighter values underneath then holding alt or option that'll split the slider up and make that transition a little bit more soft and that's basically it so in a way we've used that black color underneath almost like a green screen that we can put the sky into you can do this with basically any image it doesn't have to be these clouds sometimes it helps to blur things a little bit and maybe even desaturate them so here i'm actually going to adjust the hue saturation of these clouds just a little bit i'm going to bring down the saturation and make them a little more subtle all right now when it comes to blend if in after effects this is a lot like the gradient map problem there is no such thing as blend if in after effects you can kind of replicate the blend if setting for this layer using some channel effects but nothing for the underlying layers like we're doing for these clouds however if in photoshop if i select this clouds layer and copy it into a new document i can do that in the layers panel menu with the duplicate layer command and i'll set the destination to new that creates a new document and i can give it a name here i'll call this sky blend that puts these clouds into a new document with all the blend if settings intact so i'll save this file just as a regular psd then i import that psd into after effects and i'm going to import it as one of these composition settings and make sure this editable layer styles box is selected that's going to create a new composition with this one sky element in here and if i copy this layer and paste it into the main comp after effects actually does honor those blend if settings from photoshop so i'll put this under the knockout layer and we have blend if in after effects however it's blend if with no access to the blend settings they're kind of baked in here believe it or not you can't even copy those settings from one layer to another but i'll post this clouds file with those settings baked in however if you want to customize it definitely something you need to do in photoshop so i now have my basic chrome colors mapped on here let's get back into photoshop and i could just start to dial in the image with a few more elements now since we swapped out all of the black for those clouds i think we can afford to bring in some darker colors i'm going to drag in another texture that has some much darker values i'll also include this in the clipping mask and i'm going to set this to overlay mode and bring the opacity down to maybe 40 percent so anything underneath the gradient map adjustment layer would just kind of push around the reflections but then if this sits on top of the gradient map adjustment layer it creates almost a little bit more grit and detail to kind of sit on top of the chrome then same thing over here in after effects i've imported that same texture i'm going to drag it in here and get the scale right set it to overlay mode and i'll make sure it's underneath that knockout layer and take the opacity down to 40 percent all right then back in photoshop that did bring in some slightly darker values but it's nice that there's a little bit of bandwidth left in the lighter values as well because it's always fun to drag in a lens flare and i'll set that to screen mode and i'm just going to adjust the hue saturation on this and do a 180 on the hue to give this some cooler colors instead then i'll scale that down and make it kind of like a bright spotlight being reflected in here and why not double up on that with a duplicate of the lens flare now for lens flares and after effects there is of course the fantastic plugin by video copilot called optical flares that would be really cool to apply in here but i'm just going to keep it simple and use those same lens flare textures sometimes you can get away with just a static element like this i'm going to set it to screen mode and use the hue saturation effect to do the same thing and reverse the colors on that then make a duplicate of that one and there we go and i happen to love these little lens effects so i'm going to drop just one more in here just a little lens artifact that i can set to screen mode and bring the opacity down to 50 then back in photoshop i'll get that same little lens artifact in here set it to screen mode 50 opacity then i'm pretty much gonna wrap this thing up with one final adjustment layer on top a curves adjustment layer just to give it a little bit of extra contrast all right and believe it or not this very bottom text layer is still live type so aside from those lens flares of course we still have a lot of flexibility to experiment here and even still have the alpha channel completely intact okay then over in after effects so aside from of course being able to animate things one of the coolest features of after effects is just how much you can do with adjustment layers so i'm going to create a new adjustment layer on top and i'll call this overall adjustments and while photoshop adjustment layers are reserved pretty much for color correction adjustments in after effects we can use an adjustment layer to do things like add a little bit of noise so i'll use this noise effect set to about seven percent then i can use an effect like gaussian blur on an adjustment layer i'll set it to two and then i'm going to sharpen it right back up with an unsharp mask effect and i'm even going to bring the amount of this up to 100 which may seem like a strange combination of effects especially to blur something and then sharpen it right back up again but i end up using this noise then blur then sharpen combo all the time subjective of course but i think it just makes things look a little bit more photographic and of course we can also add the curves adjustment to the same adjustment layer and do the same thing as in photoshop just bring in that extra bit of contrast and we can also create effects that are a little bit more distinct using adjustment layers so i could give things kind of an overall glow by creating a new adjustment layer i'm going to put this underneath the overall adjustments and i'll call it glow and first i'm going to use a levels effect to crush the blacks and kind of just highlight the really bright areas then what i want to do is give this a pretty heavy blur so i'll just go with a simple fast box blur and crank that up to about 30. then i'm going to set this layer to screen mode but what's happening here is that we're running into problems with the alpha channel because this whole thing is actually still against a transparent background so the layer doesn't have anything to screen onto but what i can do is put one more effect on here in the channel effects the solid composite effect and composite this against black and that basically fills in any transparency with black and cleans that up let's give this just a little bit of animation to kind of bring it to life and i'll just animate two things one on the live text layer let's go into the layer styles and find under the blending options the global light angle and maybe i'll set a key on that at the beginning i'll start it at 80 degrees then go to the end of the timeline and key it to just 40 degrees so that's kind of cool we get highlights moving around the edges a little bit then maybe i'll bring a little bit of movement into the faces of the letters so i'm going to select this gradient layer and i could just animate this layer to move around a little bit but instead i'm going to use an effect this distort effect the turbulent displace and that'll create some warped distortions on the gradient i can bring the amount up to 100 and the size down to 50 and then i can just animate the evolution and that'll make those distortions change over time so we'll start with a value of zero on the first frame then i'll just go to the end of my timeline and key that to make one full rotation then let's queue up a little preview of the timeline and that does bring some nice life to the chrome text of course this could probably find its way into a much more complex animation in which case you might want to just consider this a pre comp in a larger project if you did need the transparent background you just want to turn off any of these layers that are sitting on top of the knockout layer so we'll wrap things up there grungy chrome in photoshop and after effects i hope you guys will find this useful and or interesting if you're not an after effects user hopefully this might have helped to give you a sense of some of the similarities and differences between the programs thank you for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: Texturelabs

Views: 33,789

Keywords: chrome text effect, after effects chrome, photoshop chrome, photoshop tutorial, after effects tutorial, metal text, shiny, text effect, adobe photoshop, chrome effect, metallic effect, metal effect, motion graphics, motion graphics tutorial, graphic design, special effects, techniques, learn, how to, photoshop metallic effect, after effects text animation, blend if, layer styles, bevel and emboss, inner shadow, textures, lens flares

Id: B-n_43XvLgg

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021