Header Text

[Mackles]

Showing my lack of experience here, I know, but anyway! Always wanted to know, how do you create text like this?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I know people have done their own custom header texts, so there must be a way... I just don't know how yet Thanks in advance for any help!

[Inarus]

Firstly, I would strongly recommend Photoshop over Gimp as the latter makes it so much harder to get the styles desired. The following is based upon Photoshop, Gimp's terms are slightly similar but lacks many features (most notably adjusting bevels and seeing the results in realtime. Now, brace for wall of hastily written text from memory. Gods this is gonna be complex...

Obviously start off with making your text, colour: Grey (Halfway between black and white, so 50% ), and work at a high resolution, you can scale the finished product down easily and this often gives better results, but you cannot scale it up, that just leads to awful pixels

Once you have your text, you'll apply an Inner Bevel, you'll most likely want Chisel Hard for the sharp effect and to increase the size of the bevel until the bevel meets in the centre... that's a bit hard to describe tbh. You would not need to set any smoothness for text such as the above. Experiment with the angle of the lighting for the preferred effect, but remember to keep it uniform, bit pointless if gave it a background of a blazing sun in the top left corner but the bevel is lit from the bottom right For the lighting, you'll want white as the colour and a layer style of either Screen, Lighten, Colour Dodge or Linear Dodge, the key thing is to experiment here, each style gives a different effect, particularly once you colour and texture your text. The latter two styles tend to be very bright and require a lower opacity (a slider you should mess around with anyway for the desired effect). For the shadow, you'll want Black normally with a layer style of Multiply, Colour Burn or Linear Burn, again the latter two are very strong but interact with colour better The key thing with layer styles is to experiment. You can make a very simple but acceptable bevel with the default styles but it takes a lot more time of messing around with styles and opacity sliders to get better results. At first you won't even remember what these damn styles do, so just click on each one and see what it does .

It's been ages, yet I'm still not sure what contour does exactly, click it, experiment with it, see if it works, if not, remove

Hopefully when you accept this you'll have a nice bevelled text. Looks good doesn't it? No it doesn't, its fake and bland and crucially grey

Colour can be added in various ways - changing the colour of the text itself, finding a good texture online which fits or by using the adjustment layers Colour Balance or Hue/Saturation. For adjustment layers you simply pick one, adjust the values to find the right colour then right click the layer and Create Clipping Mask, the layer should snap to the text layer below it and be influenced by that layers bevel style.

Textures can be applied similarly by pasting them in, positioning them, then Creating a Clipping Mask so they become part of the text layer. Unfortunately if you are using Gimp I don't think there are any Clipping Masks, easiest way to replicate them would be to right click your text layer, select Text to Selection (a moving border will appear around the text outline) then select the texture, right click it, and select Add Layer Mask, lastly select the tick box "Selection" and your Texture should now be over the text. Move the text though and the texture above won't move.

Lastly you'll want to change the texture's blending mode from Normal to something else, Screen/Lighten/Dodge are good for textures which brighten the layer below, Darken/Multiply/Burn are good for darkening layers below, Soft and Hard Light are good for... well other stuff. As always, experiment with each.

Now there's one catch to all this, and that's that I've used a load of complicated terminology and lost you at step one. Gimp is a good starting point, I used it myself until I finally gave in to Radboud and progressed to Photoshop, but Photoshop is much easier to use and yields far more professional results. Browse for tutorials on the net is good advice, if you wish I can quickly make a sample piece of text in either of the above softwares, though I'm a bit rusty at Gimp and can't really get good results in it.

I'm a bit lacking in time despite being seemingly eager to reply to this, I'll try and neaten it up tomorrow, with perhaps a sample or two If I don't, feel free to PM me, I forget things quickly.

Tips:
- Don't settle with something looking good, always experiment with dropdown boxes and sliders, see if you can get better.
- Most software gives hints when you hover over things, read em!