Chrome Text Effect - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends today I'm gonna show you how to create a chrome text effect in affinity photo a topic that was suggested by gosh thank you for that my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer from the in Austria and I want to thank all of my patrons to support me and make these videos possible that is super important thank you and let's get started so you can see here we have already a chrome font let's hide that and create a new text layer whoop like that let's write Chrome in here like this make it maybe a little bit bigger okay good so you can see this is just a normal flat font nothing special about it and the main way to do a chrome effect in affinity photo is to use the 3d layer effect and the bevel emboss layer effect together where can you find them very easy you select your text layer and then go to the effect tabs over here and there you can see we have a long list and two of them one of them says 3d the other one says bevel emboss if you can't see the effects tab no problem you go to view and then to studio and then here you see effect make sure there's a hook next to it if not just click to make that hook okay good so first of all we want to click on the little field next to 3d so to activate it but then we need to click over here on the little wheel this will give us a pop-up window and this is important because as you can see here there's a lot more settings in there the first one you see up here is called radius and this will influence how deep the effect goes into our font and the numbers I'm using are specific to the resolution of my canvas and the size of the text so don't go to the point by the settings experiment with them because you can create hundreds of different chrome looks as you will see in a second the next one the softness makes the effect softer or which we can't see right now but I would let it at zero pixels at the moment like I say play around with your own settings the next one the profile this is one that is really important because when you click in here you can see that this gives you a curve and with the curve you can decide and basically design the shape of the surface of your font the 3d surface okay so you can click in here and there are some predefined curves that you can choose from but of course you can also go in here and simply create your own design and as you can see and when you click you can also add more points you can make really abstract things for example I would say this looks a little more like Middle Ages kind of thing and you can do it more sci-fi and all these kind of different styles that you want to have here and you can see also if I push this up here part of the phone starts get flat so you can do some really interesting cool designs in here I will leave mine here about here Matt looks good okay cool good so the next one are about the quality of the light and I want to point this out right now you can add in 3d and if for this effect you even have to do that at multiple light sources but these settings here the diffuse the specular and the shininess they are universal for all the light sources you cannot adjust them individually it's important to understand so not to mess up your settings afterwards so I'm here I will go with these settings 30 hundred and a hundred like that and already you can see starts to look pretty much like Chrome so that's a good start good the ambient light is basically the light that comes from the surrounding and this you can imagine like being in a completely dark room or being in a very bright room so if you set this up to very high you can see that also the font goes very bright and kind of blown out with the light so I will set this to zero because I don't want to have any ambient light I want to add my own light sources to create my own effect good so below that we have the light sources it starts of course with one light source and then you can add and remove light sources with these buttons and the only settings that are specific to the individual light sources are the direction and the color and next to it it says azimuth and elevation and this basically only means the direction and the degree the light comes from and you have this little circle here which should simulate a ball and with that ball if you move around that little white point on top of it it gives you different directions from which the light can come in your design so you should play around with those this gives you very interesting and creative options to do that and if you want the light not to be as bright you can go into the color and set it up so right now it's white and if you set it to black of course there is no light at all so this means with the color you can also dim the strength of the light because there is no extra setting for the brightness of the light at the moment okay good so let's set this up and I want really to invite you to play around one thing I wanted suggest and this can make the font really more interesting and also add some funky effects if you want to is am to add one of the light sources which has some color in it specifically color that comes from the surrounding so in this case I would say I want to have like a darker blue in here for my sky in the background and I can use this to give a little bit of the impression that I have some lights coming from the surrounding and reflecting a little bit the surrounding in my font but to come to the funky part which I talked about is when you make this brighter like that and you said it for exam coming from below you can have a little effect like from these Starcraft at World of Warcraft in these kind of games which is more like this kind of epic fantasy kind of light or even sci-fi light so you can do some cool things with that as you can see so really take the freedom to play around with that and create your very own chrome looks ok so let's make this darker again like that ok that it's okay good so now we add some more light sources I will dim them a little bit so make this medium grey move it around just so I have more options to set my highlights and well bring different forms of shininess to my to my font so you can play around and see what do you like where should the light come from what kind of areas of the phone should be brighter or darker let's see mmm that's this looks good ok let's add another one I want to make this even darker and like I said uses many light sources and light directions as you want to really play around with it and see what looks good to you because this is very individual thing okay let's go like that good ok so this already looks kind of ok but I still want to have my emboss and a bevel effect so let's click on that activate that and the first thing you want to do is because there is different kind of settings how this effect can play out and if you have this kind of pillow effect it looks like it's pressed the font is pressed into a soft surface so this is not what we want we want to have inner so it's this inside of our font and again we can play around with the radius let's see and you can see this adds kind of a different additional highlight to the font which i think looks pretty cool it makes it a lot more believable you can also play with the softness let's set it up like this and the profile again here is pretty important as you can see BAM this gives it a completely different style and look to it that looks pretty good okay let's keep that and again you can play around with where your light should come from mmm let's see let's do it like that mmm yeah I think I think that's good I think that looks cool it looks pretty Chrome to me so there you have it the chrome font how to create it play around with it be creative with that and by the way if you find a good setting for that maybe save it as an affinity photo file because afterwards you can copy the effect to other files and the way you do that is you go to your layer that you have set up before so you open the affinity photo file with the text and with the settings to that text layer and then you simply right click on that layer and go to copy and then go to the other affinity photo files select your text layer and go to edit paste and paste the FX so the effects for that layer so you can apply it to another effect and in this way you can basically save chrome effects that you have created before ok that was the video have a lot of fun with that thank you for watching and if you have a nice idea for a topic please suggest it in the comments bye