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This tutorial is merely a GIMP conversion of the photoshop Ray of Light² tutorial by Trevor Morris at http://user.fundy.ne...otoshop16.shtml. I have skipped some minor steps in his tutorial. What you need to know: How to work with the layers dialouge, access the filters, and use the text tool.
[*]Make a new, large, square image (eg. 500px by 500px) and fill it black. It is nessesary that its square for one operation later in this tut, but you can crop it to your liking afterwards
[*]With white selected as the text colour, write a short text (eg. your nickname) with the text tool. Choose a large enough font size (I chose 50) but small enough so that the width of your text doesn't span too much of the image width. If you have a long name, consider using two lines to write the text. We're doing this so the light rays do not exceed the image boundries and thus you can copy and paste the text (into a sig for example) and don't end up with light ray stumps... Also, a nice thick font works best. And finally, the text has to be twice as large from what you want in the end, because we will resize the image to smoothen some artifacts.
[*]Copy and paste the text layer so its centred and delete the old text layer
(Should be like that except I cropped mines for tut purposes)
[*]Duplicate the text layer. Name the top text layer "Text" and the bottom one "Backlight"
[*]On the "Text" layer do layers->colours->invert (so it turns black) and turn off viewing for this layer.
(Layers should look like that... Ignore the overlight layer)
[*]On the "Backlight" layer, do layers->layer to image size and uncheck preserve transperancy in the layers dialouge...
[*]Now the fun part :), go to "filters->distorts->polar coords". Make sure the "to polar" box is unchecked and apply the filter.
[*]Do "image->transform->Rotate CW 90 degrees"
[*]This is the step where you can control the amount of backlight rays. Go to "filters->distorts->wind" and make sure the edge affected is Leading and the direction is Right. Play around with the threshold and strength settings to your liking. Higher threshold will yeild more distinct rays and higher strength will make longer rays. Apply the filter and you can repeat this step to add some wind to the Left.
(Should look something like this)
[*]Do "image->transform->rotate CCW 90 degrees"
[*]Do "filters->distort->polar coords", make sure the "To Polar" Box is checked.
[*]Clear the white areas so the corners of the layer once again become transperant.
[*]Go to "filters->blur->motion blur", (you may want to turn on the preview) select zoom as the type of blur and select an appropriate length (usu. so that the rays are 2-3 times longer than the height of the text). You will notice the zoom blur isn't smooth, so go to "image->scale image->and resize to 50%"
[*]Turn on the "Text" layer and have a look at it.
(Should look something like this, my rays are angled down because I was experimenting with the text position. Yours should be equally spread out in all directions if you kept your text centred. Yours should be sharper too, since I blured mines... don't ask)
[*]Now for some shadow. Duplicate the "Text" layer and name it "Shadow".
[*]Filp the "Shadow" layer vertically.
[*]On the "Shadow" layer, activate the perspective tool. I also suggest going to view->show grid & turning on snap-to-grid. You should change the grid colour to white (how?) or add a temporary white background to see it. Click on the text in the "Shadow" layer and drag out a perspective shadow. Change the layer opacity to 50% so that it looks somewhat like:
(Sorry I can't guide you better on making the shadow, its a bit tricky. Try to align the top of the shadow to the bottom of the text)
[*]Now You can try to sharpen your rays, filters->unsharp mask, and colourize your image or map a gradient, "layers->colours->colourize" or "filters->colours->map to gradient". You can also add a faint glow around the text by duplicating the "Text" layer, inverting the colour of the bottom one, and applying a gaussian blur.
[*]You can now crop the image, I used "Image->Canvas Size"
(Turned out below par, but Im sure you guys can do better)
Oh yeah, this isn't limited to text either... with some imagination you can make:
