It's very easy to create a metal-like text. You can fill your text interior with a pattern wich is irregular enough and use hot-wax-coating. Only, this example uses no pre-defined pattern, and has a nice 3d effect. Instead we are making "metal text" a different way..

1. Take a greyscaled image, with black background and white foreground.
2. Type a text and make it large enough. Choose a font which is thick enough, small lines will ruin the effect. IMPORTANT: Do not release the selection around the text !!

IMAGE/SPECIAL FILTERS/ADD NOISE
3. Add 100% RANDOM NOISE

4. Now release selection
5. Choose BLUR MORE and if the individual witdh of the characters is large enough, once more BLUR just for the fun of it.

Click SELECTIONS/MODIFY/TRANSPARENT COLOR
6. Select the text by drawing a rectangle around it, and modify the selection by choosing the transparency color BLACK. Increase the tolerancevalue, if the selection shows strange curves and isn't nicely wrapped around the text..
7. Now use the histogramfunction EQUALIZE.

8. Release the selection, choose once more a BLUR

9. Choose the effect HOT-WAX coating.

10. Now select the text once more like number 6, and choose adjust Brightness/Contrast and adjust them to Brightness 17 and Contrast 6. This is to make a nice metal effect..

COLORS/ADJUST/GAMMA CORRECTION
11. The 3d borders around the text are too light now.. Choose GAMMA correction and set the Gamma to 0.71 to make the 3d borders a bit darker. Expiriment with this value to get better borders.

12. Now, almost done. Choose SHARPEN MORE and your text is done !

PSP 4.0 Tips and Tricks Index