I've seen some great layouts with normal typefonts all jazzed up with color and shadowing. Outside of a simple colorize and drop shadow, how do you make them look so cool?

Like this:

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~ Mom to my scrap inspration Ethan, almost 4yo (with a little girl on the way!)
~ Come visit my SBB Gallery
~ Independent Designer at Scrapbook-Elements.com - Want some Freebies? New Freebie added 9/13!

In PS, you rasterize them which turns them into an image like a photo. You can't change the spacing between the letters or the letters themselves after rasterization, but you can play with the colors and effects like you would a photo.

HTH!

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><> LeeAndra <><
CREATING FOR
Miss Hunibuni :: Rachael Giallongo :: Mandabean
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Very cool -- thank you!!! That worked

__________________
~ Mom to my scrap inspration Ethan, almost 4yo (with a little girl on the way!)
~ Come visit my SBB Gallery
~ Independent Designer at Scrapbook-Elements.com - Want some Freebies? New Freebie added 9/13!

You can apply a style to them. There are some preset styles that come with photoshop and plenty you can download for free online.

Layer-style-blending options - styles (and there is a wider selection of styles to be found if you click on the tiny arrow on the far left of the window

Styles can do anything from apply a metal effect, to glass, to glowing text, to clear embossed, to stone etc etc etc etc etc

You may also want to consider adding texture through the use of filters.


maya

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Maya -

What I frequently do is BEVEL & EMBOSS and put a contrasting stroke around the letters. Also if you use outline letters you can always fill them with a pattern like tartan, flames, etc.

One more thing, you can apply styles without rasterizing them so that they are still editable. I usually only rasterize text if I have to 'erase' parts of the text for whatever reason... hth!

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