How to: Gold Text Effect - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing today i'm going to show you how to create this beautiful gold text effect and give you a lot of artistic advice and secret sauce along the way my name is olivia i'm a professional designer and i want to thank all of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible let's get started so here's already the first artistic advice when you choose a font to use with the effect look for a font that is wide enough or fat enough so you can actually see the texture so maybe a fat font or look for a specifically a bold font and also look for a font that has a design that supports the texture you want to apply to it to make the texture feel more realistic in this case i chose a font that's called tahu it is free to use i've linked it below the video with the other resources so how do we create the effect first of all what we need here is a rectangle in the background to give us a black background like this so you can see down here we have our rectangle tool and then simply drag out the rectangle set the fill color to black and this is also to shine more with our text and texture effect to just make it more visible next thing of course we need our text so go down here to artistic text tool click and drag it to the size you want to use and write your text and then of course we want to switch to the font we're actually using so let's go up here and you can see beautiful let's adjust the size again like this looks good i will put it a little bit more to the right because we will create some gold dust too to make the gold look even more amazing okay so we need to apply some texture to this i have actually downloaded two different textures this is the first one as you can see it's just some painted rock i think so and then we have the second one which is actually a golden painted wall the reason why i use two is so i can blend them together with each other to get an even more realistic result so what we need to do here is that we select both of them and then put them into a group so ctrl g to create that group like so and now use your text layer where you have written the word gold or any kind of other word of course and then put it on top of your group right click and then mask to below and so we already have the gold inside of our text but this is not the end there is a lot more steps to make this really nice and realistic so first of all you can see here now if i adjust the opacity this will blend my two textures with each other and give me a little bit more choice in the gold color and also in the gold texture and i feel this helps a lot to make it more realistic also because this is in a group i can still move around the texture if i feel like it looks more realistic at another spot so you can see you can also remix the textures here by just moving them around so this is really really helpful good now here is the most important part of that trick we want to make our gold look a little bit more 3d to give it a bit more substance so the way we do that is that we select our gold group let's call this actually here gold text so we're not confused what this is so this is the gold tags group and now i go to effect and i go to 3d turn that on first of all and then you want to click on that little wheel here that is really important because here you have a lot more settings so here are some very important sliders to look for first of all the radius basically gives you the thickness of your gold like this and here's another thing to look out for the profile this is super important because this defines how the edge is bending around the shape and you can see here when i click down here on these predefined shapes for my profile we get very different looks from this and this can give you a harder look a softer look a more metal look so you can get a lot of different things and make this really beautiful i will click here and bend this up to a way where i feel good but at the same time i have a little bit of a hard edge here so here is the next thing and that is light and light creates shape as you know because light simulates the depth of an object in a 2d space okay so this is how we get our 3d effect we have ambient light which is the light that is just in the room and i want to set this to a nice orange tone that is a little bit darker so i think like this this will also as you see change the color of my texture a little bit and here this is really really important to understand these colors really define how realistic your result is looking so play around with them get a good feel for them discover your artistic expression and just find the way you want to create this the look you want to create this the most important part apart is is that you are happy with the result right good here's the next thing the light sources so first of all what i'm going to do is i want to set the highlights on the corners on the edges of my font so you can see here light source one i will move this over to the side you can see now that i've moved it to the side i only have light here on this side i will change the color here to give this a little bit of a yellow touch let's go like this looks good okay then i'm creating a second light so click on add here this will make a second light source i want to have this light to come from below like so you can see here down here that looks about right uh around like at the corner actually like so okay good this time i want to set this to a nice darker orange you can see this gives a different flavor looks a little bit like there's a flame coming from below really beautiful you can really bring your tacks your texture alive with these kind of things and then i want to have a third one let's click here on add again like so let's again make this a little bit yellowish orange like this make it a little bit brighter and here you can see when i make this brighter when i make this darker when i give it some color this really changes how our gold is looking let's see um go with your eyes play around just get a feel for it i feel like i feel like this looks good here maybe a little bit less okay cool and again this is non-destructive you can still go back in there and play around with the settings to see what you want to have let's for example adjust the ambient light a little bit let's go like this okay perfect good so we are already along the way pretty far but there's more steps to make this even more realistic to make it look even better so what i want to do next is to create a dodge and burn effect to just burn the texture a little bit and make it a little bit more uneven because life isn't perfect right so i will create a pixel layer here call it dg for dutch and burn and then again i want to apply the font as a mask to it so i will go here and have my text layer right click duplicate that move it up here on top of my dg my dodge and burn layer right click again and then say mask to below beautiful so now when i create dodge and burn it will only be applied to the font area okay so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to use my paint brush set it up in a way let's see nice small size here opacity 60 looks good hardness soft looks also good and what we need to do here this is really important set our dodge and burn layer to soft like like so soft light as a blend mode and then open this up and everything that's below 50 percent here from the grayness will make it darker on everything that is above 50 percent of grayness like up here this will make it brighter but we only want to make it darker and you can see here i will paint on different areas here just to make the look of the gold a little bit uneven make it a little bit more orange make it a little bit darker in certain areas and then leave it brighter at in other areas and this just gives it a bit more realism and just makes it very beautiful like so like i said life isn't perfect the world isn't perfect so these little imperfections these little differences and how things look just give a better touch to it and bring it actually to life so look at that when i turn it off it looks like that is good but it's artificial and then we have the imperfections and now it looks a lot better and here comes the magic what i want to do is to have some gold dust behind my text so here's the sand boom yeah we are poor we only can afford a fort desert scent but no worries about that we will simply recolor it so with our scent layer ctrl g again to create a group like this and then simply create a recolor adjustment in here like this you can see recolor is it of course we don't want to have red scent we want to have yellow scent like this just give it a color that feels nice and we're gonna use this dust here on the side anyways so let's go a little bit like this i don't want it to be too strong just a little bit also very nice and bright this looks good okay so how are we going to make this into nice realistic dust and where to put it i will make this a little bit smaller here like so because i want to have it for example up here and then i will right click and rasterize as you can see this is image right now i don't want to have that rasterize that really nice also set the blend mode to lighten like this i will show you in a second why i need that and then i go in here use my erase brush i want to have higher hardness opacity 100 like this the size is okay and then i will simply delete everything i don't need so now we have some gold dust up here here comes in why i need the light and blend mode i will hold ctrl click and drag this to the side and you can see now i have a copy and the copy is beautifully blending with the other gold dust i have in here so i can just move it anywhere and don't be worried about the black that we had in the original background of our gold dust right so let's move this down here i will simply leave it like this and then make another copy and maybe move it down here to have the effect on this side of the d very nice beautiful okay so now we need to animate this a little bit not animate in the sense of motion animate like blowing a little bit of wind into our sand so here is the secret source on how to do that select your layer zoom in a little bit and then use your mesh warp tool and then simply double click on an area you want to bend you want to adjust and you can see here now i move this down a little bit i move this over a little bit don't go too extreme because in that case what could happen is that you have stretched pixels that don't look nice but you can see now we have this a little bit flowing and floating through the air so this can have a really nice effect and just give a very nice animated impression for our texture here let's go to the next one again mesh warp double click on that area i will also double click up here because i want to bend this down a little bit like so so it's hidden behind the o bend this side here up a little bit like so and i will move this over here very nice let's give this a little bit more animation here so our dust is blowing down here and then over here you can see that this is now in that area a little bit too much pixels starting to stretch not what we want so let's move this a little bit back because that was a little bit too much but this looks nice and here we have our last part again click on meshwarp and then click somewhere where we feel like okay this could be a nice place for our animation let's move it like this very nice maybe also click down here to let's see bend this over a little bit in that area again let's see that looks good very nice very nice flow over here okay perfect let's click on apply and you can see this is already very nice but it is a little bit too like weak so what we want to do here is we take our group let's call this send like so then i will right click and duplicate that group and then i will right click again and rasterize that group and now i will set the blend mode to screen this will make it a lot more intense and here is the next thing we're going to do we're going to use our erase brush let's make it now soft like go like this opacity rather low let's go like this and then maybe also set it a little bit smaller ah that's too small go a little bit bigger that's good and now i can just delete some parts again think about how you can animate think about how you can make things a little bit less perfect give it a little bit more texture because that imperfection also means life at the same time also means that things just feel more real because that is just how life is how we are used to things right so you can see here when i delete some parts and our screen blends doesn't have effect on everything you can see now when i zoom out here and i turn this layer off and on it is getting brighter in some parts but not in all parts and this just makes it more interesting and brings everything alive a bit more and you can still go in here if you want to let's for example set the opacity a little bit higher and you can still erase some parts this is very dynamic just play around with the areas that you want to affect by this and see what kind of results you want to have all right that was the tutorial for today i really hope you enjoyed that and you learned a lot if you did maybe subscribe to my channel and hit the bell button so you get notified leave a nice comment leave a like that really really helps me and i want to see your results in my facebook super fan group so also join that everything is linked below in the video see you soon bye [Music] you