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Adding a Highlight and Shadow

Lesson 4 from: Transforming Text into a Stylized Logo

Ben Willmore

Adding a Highlight and Shadow

Lesson 4 from: Transforming Text into a Stylized Logo

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

4. Adding a Highlight and Shadow

Light your text to add a sense of dimension by adding highlights and shadows.

Lesson Info

Adding a Highlight and Shadow

All right, now, we've gotten that nice and I've liked the overall look. Now let's add a highlight to the text. I'll zoom out just so it's a little easier to see what I'm doing. And I'll work on the layer that's above. That's the layer that contains the lighter text. If you don't wanna see the path that's around it, you can just type Command + H, Control + H in Windows, to hide the edge. And all I'm gonna do is go to the bottom of my layers panel. I'm gonna click on the letters FX, and I'm gonna choose a choice of an inner shadow. And when I choose that, it's remembering the last settings I used. Your last settings, the defaults, probably won't be these. So let's look at what I have it set up as. First, I clicked on this little square here, and I chose this kinda yellowish color. This is a color I commonly use on my website and in designs related to my company. So I thought it would be good for a highlight. Then, in here, I've set the blend mode to normal. Usually, it would be set to mu...

ltiply. And if you don't change it from multiply, then all it's gonna be able to do is darken. And you're not gonna notice it much. So I had to set it to normal to just get it to show up without doing anything fancy. The opacity controls how much I could see it. So if I brought it way up, it'll completely obscure the color of the text that's underneath, and I ended up bringing it down a little bit. I ended up right around 70%. So you can see a little hint of the reddish of the text showing through that yellow. So the two blend together. The angle here determines what angle the light comes from. And I wanted mine to come from the upper left. So that's where I have that pointed. Then, distance is how far down and to the right it's gonna move this little edge that's here. So if I brought my distance down, you'd see it'd be snugged right up against the edge and I could move it further. Well, I need to keep it close enough that it looks like it's kind of attached to that edge. So in my particular case, I think I used seven pixels. Choke means how much space should this be solid and not fading out before it starts getting that soft edge. And I have my choke set to 10%. I don't think it's all that critical. If I brought it down, you'd find it a little bit softer on the edge. And if I brought it up too high, you'd see a solid band of color before it starts fading out. But around 10%, I liked it. Then, size controls how soft the edge is. If you want a really soft edge like that one or if you want it crisper. And I think I ended up around eight on that one. Those are the general settings that I changed. Just so you know, you do have a contour setting. If you ever want something like chrome or something else, you can go with one of these weird ones like this. And experiment with these various settings. They can be fun, but I just left that at default. All right, now I'm gonna click Okay. So we have the highlight now. We have the thickness that I liked. And the only other thing I'd like is a drop shadow so that it doesn't just hit the white background. Instead, there's just little hint of softness there. But I don't want the drop shadow to fall on this dark area. I want that dark area to define it. So let's work on the layer that's below. Let's go down to the letters FX and let's tell it to add a drop shadow. Now, with drop shadow, again, this will remember the last settings I used, so it's probably not gonna be the same on your machine. But the default is multiply mode, and I am using that setting. Opacity is gonna control how much you can see through the shadow. So if you put it up to 100, you can't see through it at all. And I wanted it to be relatively light so that it feels more like the logo is floating and not like it's really close to touching the ground. Then here we have distance, and that's how far down and to the right it's going to move that shadow. And notice, I'm using a setting called Global Light. What Global Light does is it makes sure that any change I make to this angle affects all other layers that have an angle setting. So you remember that highlight that I added over there. If I change this angle and the highlight had this checkbox turned on called Global Light, then me moving the shadow around is gonna move the highlight as well. Do you see the highlight moved as well as the shadow? And that's fine. I want the highlight and the shadow to be in an opposite direction, so that's going to do that. All right, then down here, we can control the general look of this. And I'm gonna have my distance around 10, so it's just a little ways away from the text. And then, this setting for spread is similar to the one that we had with our inner shadow, and that's how far do you want it to be solid before it starts fading out. And if you want it to be not solid at all, just completely fading out, you could set that to zero. And size controls how soft the edge is. I'm gonna kick up that size a little bit, somewhere right around 20. And so now I have a nice soft shadow. That just makes it feel like the text is a little bit floating off the background. We'll click Okay. Now, let's just make sure our logos are named. I have Digital Mastery Logo, Digital Mastery Logo Thickness, yeah, that works.

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