Hot Wax Example

Here we'll make some text that looks like it's stamped in wax or plastic.

1. Start with a new 16-million color image that is 250 pixels wide and 100 pixels high, with a white background.
2. Set the foreground color to a dark color. (I used Red: 140, Green: 82, Blue: 90.)
3. Use the text tool to enter your text, checking Antialias and Floating. Choose a fairly heavy font. (I used Arial Black, Italic, at 48 pts.)

   

4. Select Selections | None. Then select Image | Other | Erode. Erode twice more.
5. Apply Image | Blur | Gaussian Blur, with Radius set to 3.00.

   

6. Set the foreground color to a much lighter tone of your original foreground color. (I used Red: 222, Green: 206, Blue: 206.) Use the text tool to enter the same text you did previously, positioning the new text selection on top of the blurred text.

   

7. With the Magic Wand tool, select the white background of your image.
8. Invert the selection with Selections | Invert. Then choose Selections | Modify | Feather and set the feather to 1 or 2.



(By the way, this is a pretty nice effect in itself. You might simply want to skip the next step!)

9. Now, making sure that your light tone is still the current foreground color, apply Image | Other | Hot Wax Coating.



10. You can then crop the image if you like, making sure that the background color is set to the image's background color (white here).
11. With the background set to the image's background color, save the image as a transparent GIF.