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Last Updated:
Jan 30th, 2007 - 03:44:27 |
PhotoImpact has a great selection of metals to choose from, but what if you want something different and just can’t get the right look from the included presets? If this is the case, it’s easy to make your own metals; all you need is PhotoImpact and a photo of an interesting metallic surface.
I’m always taking pictures of textures; I’ll use a close up of a photo of some rust I found at a boat launch for this tutorial.
First, open up the photo and crop out the portion of it that you want to appear on your metallic element. I like to apply the Unsharp Mask as well to sharpen up the image a bit and give the texture a bit more depth. Here is what I’ve come up with for my metal.
Now give the image a name and save it. Remember which folder you saved it in as you will need to select it a bit later.
You can close the texture if you wish now, or leave it open, it doesn’t matter. Open up a piece of background paper or a new file, and using the Path Drawing Tool, choose a shape and draw it out. I’m just going to use one of the default shapes, though you can do this with your custom shapes as well.
The color can be anything, it doesn’t matter, but choose the 3D Round Mode.
On the upper toolbar, find your Material button and click it. This will open up the material box.
In this box, to choose your texture, click on the file option. A box will pop up which you will direct to the file that you saved earlier. Choose it and click open.
This will fill your shape with your custom texture.
You can change the bevel to either make the element wider or flatter by clicking on the Bevel Settings tab. I’m going to increase my bevel width a bit taking it up to 20.
To give the texture itself more depth open the Bump Tab and choose the same texture file as the bump map. I played with the density a bit to take some of the shine off. Whichever settings you choose is up to you, play around with it until you find the look that you want, try some of the other tabs as well and change other setting for different looks. Choose OK when you are finished.
Don’t be afraid to experiment, you can open up the Material Box again and make adjustments as necessary. If you get a combination you really like and know you will use again and again, press the add button to add it to the presets in the Easy Palette. I’ve ended up with this.
If you’d like to adjust the brightness and contrast to make the metal look even more like it did in the original photo, make sure you are finished with your bevel adjustments and use the Brightness and Contrast tool under Adjust in the top menu bar. Remember though, once you make changes to the brightness and contrast the shape will no longer be a path and will switch to a raster image so the material box will no longer work for changing thebevel. Change the hue if you like also for even more effects!
Have fun making metals!
© Copyright 2003-2005 by Scrapbook-Bytes; & original creator/s of tutorials/articles
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