[dreadedpestilence]

I'd like to replicate a text style in GIMP that I've seen on this web button:



rather than flat white colour text there seems to be elements of grey of differing shades giving some depth to the text and also what I presume is a drop shadow beneath.

This is probably easy as pie to do, but I'm new to GIMP and don't know the term for this technique, so hoped someone here might be able to help me out with how to achieve this.

[Solartide]

Gimme a bit to analyze the image, I'll get right back to you.

Alright, so the good news is that it's remarkably easy to do.

First you want to get your image, for my example I'm gonna use a small rectangle.



You said it has differing shades of gray, the reason for that is the background, there's a gradient from pink to dirty pink (Which, I'm sure is slang for something or another). I'm going to use the Blend Tool, with these colors and options selected. I'm going to click and drag from the top of my image to the bottom, as shown here:



As of right now my image looks like this:



I'm going to choose white as my foreground color and choose the text tool. For all text effects, what is really make it or break it is your font selection. I'm gonna go with my traditional Razer font that I use for just about everything. Go ahead and put in the text you like And place it where you want to be.



The next step is indeed a drop shadow. There's a script for this you can use, but I prefer to do it manually so I can get it perfect and the way I want it. I create a new layer right below my text, and choose alpha to selection on my text layer.



Select the new layer you made so that changes will go on that layer and not the text layer. I choose a dark gray for my drop shadow, you can test thing out a bit and get a color you really like. Click and drag the color over the the image to fill the selection with the color.



For this next part I like to zoom in real close, I'll be using 800%. I take out the move tool, and just click inside of the image. This is still on the new layer you made, the shadow layer. Then I use the arrow keys on my computer, left twice, down twice, to shift it over 2 pixels to the lower left.



Now my image looks like this:



Go ahead and right click on the image and choose select none to remove the selection. On the shadow layer still, right click the image and go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussain Blur. Keep the settings default, but go ahead and change the blur radius. The blur radius would depend on the size of the text you are working on. Since my text is fairly small, I'm going to blur it by 2 px.



My end result looks like this:



If you feel the shadow is too deep, go back to the movement step and lower the amount of movement. If I used one pixel to the left and downwards, this is my result:

This post has been edited by Solartide: 11 June 2012 - 06:29 PM

[dreadedpestilence]

Thank you

[Barbie]

I did not know how to do that.
Thankyou very much for those detailed instructions with pics Solartide !
I have bookmarked it. So glad you are here on this forum to help !

This post has been edited by Barbie: 11 June 2012 - 11:39 PM

[pass]

Gimme a bit to analyze the image, I'll get right back to you.