This tutorial will show you how to create animated neon as above. You will need Alien Skin's - Eye Candy or use one of the alternative suggestions at the bottom of this tutorial as a replacement. I used Microsoft Arial Rounded MT Bold but any thin rounded edged font should give good results.

To start open a New Image 400x200 black background. Create a new layer (raster if PSP 6) and set the foreground color to Red = 255, Blue = 0, Green = 0. Now put down your text in the center with Anti Alias and Floating checked. I used the font set to a 90 points. Once the text is down do Selections | Modify | Contract | 1 pixel. I recommend at this point you save this selection with Selections | Save to Alpha Channel. You should now have something that looks like Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Now I duplicated this layer 2 times so you will have a black background layer and 3 layers with red text. Starting from the bottom, just above the background do a Color | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast and set Brightness = -50, Contrast = 0. Now duplicate this layer giving a total of 5 layers. The 2 layers just above the Background layer should be dimmer than the top 2 layers. Now name them as I have in Fig. 2. Remember that the OFF layers are the 2 layers you dimmed down.

Fig. 2

Now make sure you have the text selected ( marching ants) then select the OFF Glass layer. Now select Image | Plugin Filter | Eye Candy | Glass set it as shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

Now select the ON Glass layer and repeat the Eye Candy | Glass as you just did to the layer before. Now you need to select the OFF Bevel and select Image | Plugin Filter | Eye Candy | Inner Bevel. Set it to the setting in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4

Once the above is completed select the ON Bevel and apply the filter as set in Fig. 4 again. Now you want to apply Image | Blur | Gaussian Blur set to 1.00 to each of the ON layers and OFF layers. Now we set the layer's properties for our ON/OFF layers as shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5

Duplicate the Background layer now. We will Merge the OFF layers together with the Duplicate Background layer. To do this turn off the visibility of the Background and ON layers. Then select Layers | Merge | Merge Visible. Now name this merge layer OFF. Turn off the visibility on the OFF layer and turn the visibility on for the others, Background, ON Glass, ON Bevel. Now merge them as you did previously with the OFF layers. Name this layer as ON. You should now have 2 layers named OFF and ON. Duplicate the ON layer 3 times so you have 4 copies and set the opacity of these layers as shown in Fig. 6 below.

Fig. 6

Now all that is left to do is save this as a Paint Shop Pro Image (*.psp) and animate it with Animation Shop. For tutorial on using *psp files with Animation Shop click here. You can also download the neon.zip (97KB) file that I used to create this tutorial.

 

Note: You can possibly replace the Eye Candy bevel and get good results with Paint Shop Pro's chisel filter or if you have Version 6 or 7 then try its inner bevel filter. The glass effects can be duplicated using saturation and color control in Paint Shop Pro and possibly correction layers in version 6 or 7. You will need to experiment with the settings on these other methods as I've didn't documented them when I tried them.

This page was last updated on February 10, 2002 by Joe Cilinceon