Here is are two quick methods for making chrome or metal looking text with Paint Shop Pro's own functions. First open a new image with a black background and add your text with the text tool set to Selection and Anti Alias. First thing you want to do is save the selection to an Alpha Channel as we will use it through out this tutorials. I have my foreground color set to white and my background color set to black at this point. I add a lineal gradient fill with the foreground to background gradient. At this point you should have something like Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

I turn of the selection and use Gaussian Blur set to about a 2.00 Radius. I then reload my text selection from the Alpha Channel with Selections | Load from Alpha Channel. Now here is where the 2 methods differ. This first method uses adjustment channels to get the effect by adding a new Adjustment Layer | Curves. You will want to play with the settings while watching your image. I set mine to what you see below in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

Once you have this the way you want it simple go to Layers | Merge | Merge Visible. To Finish this off I used the Image | Sharpen | Un Sharp Mask set as Radius = 2.00, Strength = 50%, Clipping = 2. I then did Colors | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast set to 8 and 6 respectively. The finished product is show below in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

Here is the second quick method. Follow the instruction as above until you get to the adjustment layer. At this point instead of the adjustment layer use Image | Effects | Chrome. I used the settings show below in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4

I now adjust the text sharpness and brightness/contrast as I did above giving me what you see in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5

Play around with these settings/effects and you will see just how easy it is to create all kinds of metal/glass effects with Paint Shop Pro 6. The font used is Babylon Industrial and can be found at many of the freeware/shareware font sites.

This page was last updated on March 21, 2002 by Joe Cilinceon