On our "daily row" of our school of Photoshop, it's time to make one of the most famous jewlery on the world - gold. We are not going to, of course, talk about chemical, technical and physical caracteristics of this metal, we are only interested in his look.
Before you get on your computer and Photoshop, you should clear some caracteristics of this material. You should be aware of its lightness and noise, reflection of enviroment on the object, and of course, color! We now have all informations we need for this. Now, it's time to Photoshop do its work.
Open Photoshop and new document, no matter on dimensions. Set Color Mode to RGB, and in the panel Contents check the option White, which will able us to work on white background. On the toolbar, click on the icon of Foreground Color, and it will open Color Picker (we talked about it in previous lessons). Type these RGB parameters: 210, 134, 0. Try to get the gold color on the other ways, too. Set all RGB-parameters on 0. Then type this hexadecimal value: D28600 in the field with mark "#". You'll agree with me, that this combination is easier to learn, than the nine numbers which we have in RGB system of colors. Here you'll see two simbols:
Upper one gives us knowledge that this color cannot be printed, because it cannot be found on CMYK pallete of colors, which gives us different color spectar than RGB. The bottom one icon tells us that this color is not "web safe" color, which will not be seen in the web browsers, how it looks like in Photoshop. Actually, there are not all monitors gived pleasure to have more than 16 million colors. Like example we can give you cellphones in color, which use 8-bit screens, and they offer you internet services. If you click on this symbol, Photoshop will choose most similiar color to that, and there are 216 of these colors. Press Ok and take Horizontal Type tool (hotkey "T"). Type text you want, set it's height you want, and center it on the working area.
On the pallete Layers click on the textual layer holding key Ctrl. Doing that, you made a selection of the text. Go under the pallete Chanells and click the icon "Save selection as channel" which is placed on the bottom of that pallete. You get new channel named "Alpha 1". He'll help us as form with which we'll form a look of gold. Stay on the pallete Channels, and choose channel Alpha 1. Then use the filter Gaussian Blur, which you can find under menu Filter/Blur. Value Radius set on 4. You can see how it is blured now inside the text, esspecially on the edges of the text. Even that, we'll blur this result twice time more. First time with value Radius 2, and second time with Radius 1. Choose Deselect in menu Select (hotkey - Ctrl+D), and then last time use same filter, without changing its value (hotkey - Ctrl+F). Doing this we've blured and soften outter edges of the text. If your doing on the document with smaller resolution, difference in the changes will not be seen too much. You'll get best results on the documents with bigger sizes.
Get back again on the pallete Layers and make a new layer. Be aware that the new layer is placed on the top of the pallete. Then click on the icon Foreground Color and type this hexadecimal value: 999999. If you have problems with understanding access to the colors trough this method, you can type RGB values three times 153, and you'll get same color. Try that, you can see how Photoshop autommatically updates values of all color systems in Color Picker. Click Ok and click on the Paint Bucket tool on the toolbar (hotkey - G). If you're accessing this tool through keyboard, it can happen that you select Gradient Tool except Paint Bucket, because they have same hotkey on keyboard. In this case you get your Paint Bucket tool grough mouse. When you activate tool, be sure that you selected top layer and click with left mouse on the working area, which should get you result of grey background.
Next, the explanation of the many possibilites of working with alpha channel. Select filter Lighting Effects from the menu Filter/Render:
Even the filter is primarly made for simulating ligth effects, he has many suprises hidden in it. What am I talking about, you'll realize if you select from the Texture Channel pop-up menu the Alpha 1 channel. In preview window you can see relief display of convex areas, and the dark areas for the inwarded areas. We made effect of easy extruding of the area using Gaussian blur. Caracteristics of the light you can set by your own. We've got best results using this values:
Intensity: 35
Focus: 69
Gloss: 39
Material: 79
Exposure: 0
Ambience: 0
Height: 100
Source of light you should position in the upper left angle so the reflection gets from that direction. When you press Ok you should get something like on the next picture:
Don't move from the topmost layer and click its name on the pallete Layers holding key Ctrl. Make an inversion of the selection with command Inverse from the menu Select and press Delete key on keyboard to delete unwanted elements on the picture. Then unselect all with command Deselect from the menu Select (hotkey - Ctrl+D). It's time to our text gets its final "mettalic look", and we'll search result in the tool called Curves, which is located in the menu Image/Adjustments (hotkey - Ctrl+M). You can play with the curve a bit, but be aware on the changes which are made after changing shape of curve. To get good result, try to get the curve that looks like on the next picture:
When you're statisfied, click Ok. Last filter we need to use is Add Noise:
which will give us soft noisy picture which gold can have (or it not have it). For those who don't know Add noise... is located under menu Filter(Noise. Value ammount set on the 2,5%, in the frame Distribution select Gaussian and check option Monochromatic, which will keep equal tones of the noise. Check this opetions, and then click twice on the icon of the top layer on pallete Layers, which we'll open famous Layer Style window. Check the option Drop Shadow and set the values Opacity to 47%, Distance to 19 px, Spread at 17% and Size on 68 px. Angle of the shadow should be around 133 degrees.
To get most realistic shadow which's solidity is biggest next to the object, and it is drastically decreasing, click on the icon next to Contour, in the frame Quality. Like the same name says, you need to set the contours of the shadow, and you're doing that changing position of points on the curve. Check the option Corner (unless it's already done) and make a shape of the cruve which looks like on the next picture:
When you finish press Ok and check option Anti-aliased to get more soften edges of shadow. Check these options clicking Ok button to leave Layer Style window.
Work is almost finished, we just need to delete greyness which covers our text and give it reasonable color. Even you, maybe, forgotten that problem of color we solved on the beginning of the tutorial. To see the color, drag and drop textual layer on the top of the Layers pallete. Now that textual layer covered layer under it, which we need indeed. To solve this problem, we just need to give it knowledge that we just need its color and nothing else.We'll do this simple, just clicking the pop-up menu on the top of the Layers pallete, Blend Mode and change Normal to Color. Your result should look like on the first picture on the beginning of tutorial. If you want to change your gold to silver or bronze just change the color of the topmost layer, which we used only for color.
You depend on other things. So, we finished and this tutorial. It was fun to make digital gold, only thing I don't like is, the digital gold is not real, but it's gold :)) So good luck, enjoy your stay and bye.
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