3.4 Text and Final Effects

Hey guys, welcome back to the event flyer design course. My name is Kirk Nelson. In this lesson, we will finish off the concert flyer design. This is lesson 14 for the final text. So in the last lesson, lesson 13, we finished off all these glowing light effect by adding some fluid, kinda smokeish effects in there, and then working it all together into a single composition. Now, to save file space, I have combined those layers together in the file for this lesson. So it's all together in a single filed called MergedGlows. I just selected all those layers and combined them together with Ctrl or Cmd+E to merge them. This lesson, we are going to start working with the text that we have in here. And if you remember, we added this text back when we were sketching this out. We used a regular midtone gray, but I'm now going to change that to white. And I'm also going to clear off the layer styles, because we don't really need them at the moment. All right, now looking at it, I want to spend a little more time evaluating the positioning of this. So I'm gonna turn on my guide layers. And I want to just pay attention to how these letter forms are working together. For instance, I like the way this top little curl curve of the capital N sort of fits in with the G-H-T from light. It has a very similar curve to it there. I like how those complement each other. And in moving that, I think this ligature from the L could probably wrap around the top ligature from the N here and almost create an ampersand. So it would almost read Light & Noise, which would be pretty cool. But if you remember how we adjusted the actual curves before, we'll do that same thing again. So for both of these layers, I'm going to create a copy and hide the originals and then change these in the shape by right-clicking and saying Convert to Shape. Which means now, we can directly select and modify the individual points. Now, the Convert to Shape doesn't always create really nice, smooth curves to this. So sometimes this does take a little bit of effort to get a nice curve out of it, but it can be done. It just takes a little bit of time and patience in moving around the points and the tangent handles. So then we have it wrapped around. Now, in looking at this, it's really hard to kinda see that white text in there. The thought I had was that what if we used the same technique that we used before to stroke the individual paths for the figure on the paths that comprise the letters? So let's try working with that. We'll start with the light and go to Paths, and I'm gonna make a copy of this. Just so I have something to work with here. Cuz I'm going to go back and I'm going to hide that layer, but create a new one to receive that stroked line, remember? So I'll make sure that I have my brush set to that glowing lines preset that we created and then try stroking that path. Of course, we have it on Simulate Pressure, and the results aren't really that great. Let's take a look and talk about what happened here. So what's going on is, because these paths, they're all very unified, so the beginning of one path is very close to the end of that same path. We end up not getting a lot of tapering like we'd really like to see in an effect like this. And we end up with some very solid lines going all the way around, and it almost looks like just a stroked border. Not really the effect I was going for. So I'm going to undo that and go back into my Paths panel. And the way we fix this is we have to actually break up these paths by hand. And all that sounds like it's going to be a lot of work and it's difficult. It's really not. The first thing I wanna do is combine all the ones that are there, so all these overlapping areas. Those all join together into a single path shape. So I'm going to Merge Shape Components. So you see how all that then became a single shape along there. That's exactly what we wanted. Because what we wanna do now is isolate the individual paths per portion of the letters. For example, this ligature that is sort of flying out here from the L would work as its own path to be traced. And to do that, we need to break these up. Here's a great little method of doing that. If we use the Pen tool, we create new points just close but surrounding those corner points. Switch to the Direct Selection tool and grab that initial corner point, and then hit the Delete key to delete it. Because if we were to use the Delete Anchor Point tool, it joins things together. See, it doesn't create a hole, and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to break up these paths to create holes. Now, knowing the keyboard shortcuts for these tools makes things a lot faster. Hit, tap the A button to get the Direct Selection tool. If that gives you the Path Selection tool, you'll need to tap the Shift+A button to get it back to the regular Direct Selection tool. Then the P button for the Pen tool. And just continue on creating broken-up paths along the entire shape. And so that's what I've done here. You can see, by grabbing individual path components, that there's separate little elements within each of these shapes. That means when I stroke these pads, much better. And here we are with both of the letters broken up into sub-paths and then stroked to create the stroked outline. And I'm going to add that same layer style that we've used before, that's the Outer Glow, the Size dialed up, to a nice, bright glow. I'm going with the very bright yellow, in this case. So that gives us a nice effect there. But once we turn on those background merge glows, we see it, still a little bit hard to read. So let's reveal those text layers again. And now, let's set the fill to black. And let's copy that same outer glow layer style to the original layer. We'll do the same with both layers. So we've got our glowing title in there. Now, the next effect I wanna show you is one that's really, really pretty cool. Remember before how we added sort of this radial blur, this kind of light explosion effect coming from the top right area cuz I expected there to be a focal point up here to use for the title? That's the effect we're gonna do next, and you're gonna like this one. This one's actually really pretty cool. So let's grab all three layers that we have, both the text layers and the glow text line. We're going to create a merged copy from the three of them by creating Ctrl+Alt+E, or Cmd+Option+E if you're on a Macintosh. Okay, and then I'm going to Ctrl-click that new merged layer or Cmd-click to select it all and hit the Copy button or hit Edit > Copy. New, make sure the background content is black and paste this directly on here, Ctrl or Cmd+V. So I've got this merged copy of these layers on this black background. Now I need to expand this out some. I'm going to Image > Canvas Size and unclick the Relative button. And let's put this at 2000 pixels in both directions. So that gives us lots of room to work with here, and I've got this nice Light Noise written on this black background. In fact, I'm going to merge it down so it's all on one background layer. Stay with me, now, cuz this is gonna seem a little bit strange, but the result is really, really cool. I'm gonna copy the background. I'm going to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. And I'm going to start with the Polar to Rectangular setting, which looks really strange up here. And then I'm going to Edit > Transform. I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. Then I'm going to Filter > Stylize > Wind. I'm setting it to Blast and From the Right, which you can see adds some nice sorta stringy type of elements to this. And I'm going to reapply that filter a number of times. You can go to Filter, and it's right at the top here, Filter > Wind. But as you can see, the shortcut for that is Ctrl or Cmd+F. So I'm just gonna add that in until I get some nice streaks coming off from this. Now let's inverse the process of that polar coordinates. But first, we have to turn it back around, so we're going to Edit > Transform > Rotate 90 Degrees Counterclockwise, so it puts it back up at the top. Then Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, and it's the opposite one of before, so now it's Rectangular to Polar. And look at that effect. It's like this light explosion coming out. But it looks a little bit kinda stringy. It doesn't look like some nice light explosion. We'll fix that by using a Blur > Radial Blur set to Zoom, and make sure the Blur Center is right there in the middle. I'm gonna crank that amount up to about 30. And look at that. It creates this beautiful like, light explosion coming at you type of thing. And of course, I can repeat that too with, again, Ctrl or Cmd+F and keep going until we get some really great light streaks in there. Cuz now we can take this back over into our main composition. I'm gonna set this to Screen, put it underneath those glowing lines, and position it right into place. And look at that. Now, it looks like we've got some exploding light coming from our title. Pretty cool, right? The only other thing that I'm going to change here is this top glow text lines, this merged layer that we created to copy. I'm gonna leave it there. But I'm going to change the mode to Linear Dodge cuz that adds a little bit more white to it. In fact, here's another neat quick, little trick. If you go to Image Adjustments > Hue Saturation and you can crank up the Saturation for this and start playing with the Hue, you can get some other kinda interesting glow effects along those edges there. So it's not a solid-colored glow, it sort of just adds a hint of it. Those can be kinda fun if you want to play around with that. Okay, then the last thing I added some other copy information here at the bottom about like, the time and date and other pertinent information that needs to be had on a flyer. And I noticed when I added it that the white text was getting a little bit lost in the design. Which is to be expected from something so bright and vibrant and colorful as this. So I did add a slight Outer Glow to these by changing the Blend Mode of the glow to Multiply and set it to black. And you can see the difference that makes there. I did that on each of these text layers. And then I also added another one of those fluid effects, but I left it as black on white and set that to Multiply and reduced the opacity a little bit. Then also used the mask to remove areas that I thought was getting in the way of the overall composition. And that, ultimately, finishes up our concert design flyer. And that also finishes up lesson 14 and brings these design projects to a close. Guys, there's only one last lesson in this course. That's lesson 15. I do a fun little time lapse, along with some closing thoughts. I hope you'll check it out.