Now *this* you don’t see every day: Check out Scott Valentine’s quick use of a 3D preset in Photoshop Extended to create a novel text effect:
Now *this* you don’t see every day: Check out Scott Valentine’s quick use of a 3D preset in Photoshop Extended to create a novel text effect:
I love the effect, but please hold shift when scaling the text!
Oddly enough, I’ve seen several comments about the text scaling (completely missing the point, imho). No idea why so many folks are incensed about it, unless I’ve trodden on some sacred ground by not respecting the typo designer’s aspect ratio.
Can you shed some light, Fritz?
Nothing drives a typogropher (or typophile) more mad then seeing a typeface stretched and distorted without consideration for the original type designer’s “design”. Like taking a Lamborghini and “reshaping” it to look like a VW Bug. Stuff like that bugs some people.
Thanks for demoing a very interesting tool in Photoshop!
Fair enough, Ben! I don’t really consider myself a designer, and this was intended to show off the primitive rather than the end design (a choice made quickly and which I now somewhat regret – the final product is not a stellar example by any stretch).
Thanks for clarifying.
Can’t view on my iPhone. Damn you Vimeo!!
[And here I thought that replacing Flash Player with one built into browsers would solve every problem. (Gee, maybe writing client apps that consistently display media across radically different devices is actually kind of hard.) –J.]
I was able to watch it in the Vimeo iPhone app
Thanks for sharing this, John! I’m honored to once again show up on your blog 🙂
It is not a pun, but your thinking outside the box has to be rewarded, Scott!
I’d like to see what others come up with!
Wish I had thought of that effect. Now I just have to steal it. damn.
Here’s a variation you can present, Steve: put a point or spot light inside the cube, and project the text onto a plane or other object.
I hope one day that PS’s materials will be two-sided, so you can do ‘rear projection’ effects…
Hold the shift when scaling ANY object picture or text. No big deal and keeps everything in proportion – golden rule. Otherwise it’s a bad example of the use of software.
Thanks for your thoughts, Paul. I beg to differ, however, on the point of ‘bad … use of the software’. It is my impression that graphic design is intended to convey a message, not stack up rules of engagement – most books I’ve read on this treat type as amazingly fluid, almost as a starting point rather than a constraint.
I’ll post something on PhotoshopTechniques.com soon on this topic – I’d love to get a discussion going on the appropriate uses of type!
i don’t agree with the word “any” in here. There are instances where you might not want to scale proportionally.
I DO, however, think that proportional scaling should be the default, not the “press a modifier-key”-exception.
pretty nifty! ruined that awesome 3d text with some ugly ole outer glow or whatever. its like a turd on top of a cake.
Obnoxious request: Hey John, Can I make a request that you can’t fulfill? When I STEP BACKWARDS, it undoes what I want, but then it puts me back on the previous layer I working on. This is a real pain in the A because unlike Paula Abdul, I take one step forwards, two steps back in most cases. Can you get that fixed for CS12. Cheers!
I’m not real impressed with the final look, either. I used the same image in a series of videos that were aimed at getting across something new to CS5 in about 2 minutes. The glow is there because the text needed to be obvious against the background.
In hindsight, I should have actually finished the image properly. But I did have hopes that viewers would take the actual technique and make it their own.
Recent comments, however, have spurred me to build out this technique in more detail with more inspiring results 😉
I think that some the comments are on the verge of nitpicking.
Scott, as a long-time Photoshop user, User Group Manager, Adobe Community Professional, knows about the shift+Scale, the point here was to make a quick example of an innovative technique…
Scott, the only case where you can forget the shift key is if you need to scale Comic Sans. The typophiles won’t mind about the scaling part 😉