Top 5 Text Effects in GIMP

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you my top 5 text effects using this is version 2.2 M point 18 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies Media design.com as always I have tons of free software tutorials on here as well as my book of layers and free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you get enroll in any my skill share classes by visiting Gibbs cool calm and you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video I'll be using a free font from google fonts called can--it and just come over here and click the download family link if you're not sure how to download and install third-party fonts I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to that subject for both Mac and Windows here we are inside of and I'll be creating this composition as I demonstrate my top 5 text effects in before I go through my top 5 text effects I first want to set up my composition so I'm going to start here by creating a new composition so I'll go to file new and I just went with 1920 by 1080 for my composition and I'll click OK so hold ctrl and zoom out I'm gonna start by adding a gradient background by coming over here and we're gonna grab the gradient tool here you can just use the G shortcut key next I'll add some center guides so I can easily Center this gradient and I'll do that by going to image guides new guide by a percent I'll go with vertical and 50% for the first guide and then we'll go image guides new guide by a percent and we'll go with horizontal this time click OK so now I have my center guides I'll set my gradient up to be a radial gradient here inside the tool options and over here I'm going to choose a new color I have a bunch of preset colors here in a custom palette I created I will include a link to these palettes so you guys can download the colors I'm using for this tutorial and I also have a tutorial on how to get these palettes in to if you're not sure how to do that but the colors I want to use in my palette or right here so I'm just going to click on this first color click OK and come over here to my background color and we're gonna go with the second mango ish color here and I'll click OK now I'm going to come up here and I'm going to click and drag gradient so just from the very center to the very bottom right you can flip your gradient if it's not set in the proper order or the same order as mine and also make sure you have your gradient sets you foreground/background RGB once that's done I'll click back on this grading here and hit the enter key now we have our background setup so let's get into the text effects I'll come over and grab my text tool and here you can see I already have my font selected that I want to use so it's like canon font you can always click on here and then come down here and click this little icon in the bottom right that'll bring up your fonts in a new window and you can find this font so we'll start with Canon medium italic and I'm going to click turn on my caps lock key and type best and I want to select all my text here and I want to increase the size of the font so I'll hit ctrl a while I'm inside my textbox now I'm just going to come up top here and let's go with 250 for this and hit the enter key that might be a bit too big let's go down and 200 hit the enter key that looks pretty good so now I'll grab my move tool let's move this into place right about there so we have our first piece of text let's hit the T key to grab the text tool again click on here and now I'm just going to type the second word so of so it's gonna say best of let's change the size of this to 150 and I do have to make sure I hit ctrl a while I'm inside the text box and we'll go to 150 that's a little large so I'll go 125 that looks pretty good grab the move tool let's move that into place hit the T key once again click on my composition type ctrl a to select it and let's change the font to something large so let's go maybe 350 there and actually want to change the font here as well so I can click on here and start typing K a and this time I want to go with the either of the heavy or the ultra bold so let's try heavy first that looks fine so I'll go with that so I'll grab my move tool and move it into place alright so our text is set up it's kind of off-center right now so we'll have to Center but first I'm just gonna organize this so create a new layer group over here at my layers panel that bottom right icon double-click it will name this original text hit the enter key this will play a role later so I do recommend following along here and I'm just going to click and drag each one of these text layers into the text group so now everything is inside the single group alright so the quickest way to move all of the text simultaneously is to click on this transform lock icon and when we do that for all of the text layers that means if I move one of the layers for example this best layer all of them will follow along so now we can Center everything up and we can also adjust exactly where it's located here so go with the bout right there alright now that my composition is set up for this tutorial let's dive into my top 5 text effects so number one is going to be creating slanted text and we're going to do that by using the rotate tool this one will be quick and easy so while we still have the various text layers transform locked over here so this little chain link icon between the three layers is still locked what I'll do is hit shift R on my keyboard that's going to bring up my rotate tool you can also access that over here inside of the toolbox so once we have this text selected I'm just going to click and start rotating and we do have to kind of guess where we want this maybe about right here you can see the exact angle up top here so if you have an exact angle on mine just type that in so for example I can do minus 15 and when I click off of that that will adjust and when I'm ready I'll just hit rotate and all three of those text layers will now rotate along and because this text was italicized so remember all of our text here is italic that's going to allow us to have this really cool sleighing a text effect and I'll hit the M key let me get rid of these guides now and I'll click on the top layer group there number two on my top list of text effects in is the ability to fill in your text with a gradient so this will help us take some plain looking text or some boring text and make it a bit more exciting so what I'll do for this is come over to my layers panel and I'm going to start by alt click on my first text layer so that was the layer then while holding both the alt and the shift keys I'll click on the second layer and the third layer so that will select all three of my text layers and now what I'll do is come over to my past dialog and I'm going to click this icon here selection to path so that will convert my selection area we just created into a path the reason I want to do this number one is that usually when you convert a selection to a path and then back to a selection is going to make the selection area a bit more smooth number two is that I do want to use this path later on in this tutorial so it's going to come in handy so now that I have a path here I'll hit control shift 8 to deselect it and then I'll come back over here and once again click path to selection so that will reselect it sometimes I can clean up your selection area so now we're gonna go over to our layers panel and create a new layer I'm going to name this gradient text we'll fill it with transparency and click OK now we're gonna click and drag this gradient text layer outside of the layer group and I'll come over here to my palette editor if you don't have this open you first have to open the palettes dialog so you can go to windows dockable dialogs palettes once that's open you can double click on the palette you want to open up here in the palette editor so now we have all of our palettes here the first thing I want to do is grab this dark color here at the end so simply by clicking on it that will make this color my foreground color and then I'm gonna go with the lighter color next to it so I'll ctrl click on that one and that will change my background color now to that color and now on my gradient text layer I'm gonna come over and grab my gradient tool and now I'll just click and drag this and now I'm just going to drag this to the left a little bit so it matches the same angle of my texts my slanted text next what I need to do is change the type of gradient so I'll come over here we'll change this to linear and now I can come over here and just flip my colors so I like these colors better and I'm also gonna drag the gradient down a bit maybe like so once I'm ready I'll hit the enter key and now I'll hit control shift a and as you can see here our text has a nice gradient inside because we did this on a separate layer you can see I can hide the gradient text and our original text is still intact we're just going to keep this here in case we need it later but now I'll unhide the gradient text number three on my list of top five text effects is going to be the stroke effect so there are various ways of doing this I'm going to show you guys what I think is the best and easiest way to accomplish this so I'll start by coming over here and creating a new layer and I'll name this layer stroke make sure it's filled with transparency and click OK next I'm going to come over here to my past tab and remember we created this path earlier if you didn't create this path real quick just come over here to your layers panel come down here to gradient text hold the Alt key and click come back over here to the past tab and click to convert the selection to a path but I've already done that so I'll go to select none to deselect that and I'm going to click to unhide my path so once you have the path drawn around your text come over here and click the paint along the path icon yeah what this is going to do is it's going to draw a stroke around your text so first I recommend selecting the first option here stroke line solid color anti-aliasing having that checked will make your path smoother as it goes along these curves and then you can set your line width I went with 6 pixels and then down here under line style you could choose the cap style so anytime your line ends this is what the cap will look like join style anytime there is any sort of angle really that's what this is going to look like I recommend having a round join style as a to a mitre or a bevel but that's up to you the - preset I recommend having set to line unless you want to outline your text with the - and as for what color this stroke will be painted as it's going to be whatever your foreground color is selected as so I'm gonna click on this and go with a color I've been using so this almost white color here and this is once again from my palette so you can come over here and just click on the palette but I'll click OK you do want to make sure if I come over here to my layers panel you're still on the stroke layer and that way you can delete this stroke if you don't want it later or you can perform any other tweaks you want to make to it but once you're ready just click the stroke button and now our text has a stroke I'll come back to the past tab and just unhide that path number four on my top five text effects list is going to be the long shadow filter this filter is a fairly new filter but it can be used in a variety of pretty cool ways so I'll start by coming over here to my layers panel and I'll come over here to my gradient text layer and I'm just going to duplicate this layer and with the gradient text copy layer I'm going to click and drag that below the original and double click on this and rename this long shadow if the Enter key the reason we want to do that is the long shadow effect will be added directly to our text here and I want to make sure we have our original gradient text intact so now with the long shadow layer selected I'll go to filters light and shadow long shadow so here you can see why I like this effect it makes it very easy to create 3d looking text and it also allows you to easily add shadows as you're gonna see a bit later but here under style you have various options so you can make this infinite if you wanted to have that flat look that's been really popular for a few years or you can come over here change this to fading so it is that long shadow flat look but the text is fading out and you also have fading with a fixed length so if you don't want it going forever off the page and if I come back here to the first option finite that is going to be that flat long shadow look but it's going to stop as opposed to going all the way off the page so of course you can change the angle length and color as well as determine if you want to do the shadow which is going to be the long shadow effect here plus the image or if you just want to keep the shadow so you'll remember we duplicated the gradient text layer here so if we didn't want that to also be on this layer we could choose the shadow only option and that will get rid of my gradient it's up to you whether or not you want to do that but what I'll do here I'll keep the angle set to 45 and I'm going to turn down the length I think it's a bit too long right now maybe go with about right here actually I can go longer than that let's go with right there the color I'm going to keep set to my foreground color I like the way it looks especially with the stroke we added the clipping has to do with the size of the actual layer that this is on so I'll just keep this set to adjust and I'll click OK so now you'll see if I hide the gradient text layer it did get rid of that gradient now it just has the shadow on here you can of course keep that gradient if you want so come back here and unhide that layer my fifth and final text effect for this list is going to be the drop shadow effect so this is another very commonly used and very popular text effect it's usually used in order to make your text look like it's floating above a surface so it adds another 3d elements there's going to be a couple of ways to accomplish this inside of so I'll show you both methods that I use so I'll start by coming over here and duplicating the long shadow layer because this is the layer that I want to add that drop shadow to now I'm going to click and drag this below the original and double click on it and rename a drop shadow get the Enter key the reason I'm using this layer for my drop shadow is I want the drop shadow to show up below the bottom of this composition so if I added it to the gradient text layer it would show up somewhere up here and that wouldn't look right so on my drop shadow layer I'll go to filters light and shadow drop shadow so this is the first method so this is just going to add a simple drop shadow here and I can come over and change the location of this drop shadow by dragging these two sliders here and if I wanted to drag these separately I could unlink them and so now I have the X and the y so these are changing the location of the drop shadow based on the x and y axis so for example I could put it there the blur radius changes how far out the blur is gonna go so if I go way far out it's gonna make this super blurry if I go really far in its gonna take out pretty much all the blur so it's up to you how you want that to look I'll just add a bit of blur finally you can change the color so if I click on this by default it's set to black we can go with a dark blue let's actually try the light blue and click OK so there you can see what that looks like finally you can increase or decrease the opacity to make it more or less prevalent so let's make it a little less prevalent there and I'll click OK so there's the first drop shadow instance now I'll show you guys the second method for adding your drop shadow so I'll come over to the long shadow layer duplicate that layer again and drag it below so let's rename this drop shadow to at the enter key so I'm gonna use the long shadow filter again so I'll go to filters light and shadow long shadow and now I'm gonna change this to fading fixed-length and now you can see it's fading out next we're gonna change the color to something else so something dark probably that looks pretty good so I'll click OK and now I can change the angle I don't really want this going at the same angle as my current long shadow so I'm just going to play around with this you can either go all the way to the right to 180 or all the way to the left to negative 180 depending on where you want this located go with about right there come down to length and I'm just going to make this a bit shorter you could change the midpoint which is essentially changing at what point this starts to fade out so if we decrease the midpoint it's gonna make that fade out become more and more faint and I actually like the way that looks and once again you could choose the composition so just the shadow or shadow plus image whatever you want to do I'll just do the shadow only and click OK and there we have another instance of the drop shadow alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 88,173

Rating: 4.9256964 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, text effects, 3D text, long shadow, typography, gradient text, stroke text, drop shadow, text filter

Id: md4K66fd8RA

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020