Emboss and Deboss Text and Shapes in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Emboss and Deboss Text and Shapes in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, creating emboss and deboss effects in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating emboss and deboss effects. You're going to learn how to apply these to text and shapes, and you'll also learn a really cool technique for adding texture to the effect but living the text or the shape editable. Also you're going to learn a bit about inverting shape pass in Photoshop which could come handy in other projects in future. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you would like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started creating emboss and deboss effects in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 Emboss Text Effect: The first effect that we're going to create is an emboss text effect. That means that text is going to be raised up from the document. I'm just going to make a document that's about 2,000 pixels wide by 1,200 pixels high. But it really doesn't matter how big your document is because this effect is going to work with any size document. I've already preselected orange color here, it's my foreground color. I've only got one layer in my document so I'll press "Alt" "Backspace," that would be "Option" and "Delete" on the Mac, to fill the background layer with my color. I'm going to switch these colors now so that the foreground color is white because that's going to be my text color. I'll click on the "Type Tool," just going to select "Horizontal Type." Now, you can use whatever type face you like because we're doing a raised effect. Because it doesn't have any pattern in it or anything, you can really use anything. I'm just going to click here once and I'm going to type the word "DREAM" in capital letters where the font I am using only does capitals anyway. With the Type Tool still selected, I want to increase my font size a bit. So I'm going to click in the size box, hold the "Shift key" as I just press the "Up Arrow key" to go up in size a little bit faster. Let's just move this down, central in the document. As I've said, any shape or size font would be pretty okay for this particular effect. Now, to create our emboss effect, that raised look, we're going to click on the "Type Lab" because that's where the action takes place. We're going to click the "fx" icon and choose "Bevel and emboss." That's going to allow us to apply a bevel effect. Now, the effects settings we're going to use is an inner bevel. We've got other options here, but we want an inner bevel so the raised area is on the inside here. We want it to be smooth and we want it to have a reasonable depth. Now, you can increase or decrease the depth, and the size of your document may also affect the depth. But at this stage, because we haven't finished the effect, we're actually going to get rid of the white. It's a little hard to say whether we've got a right setting here. You might want to just apply some setting here, but plan to come back and fix it in a minute. Now, you've gone up and down and we want up because we want a raised effect. The size is going to affect how high it is. Because I'm using a really thin font here, I don't want the size to be very big at all, and you probably won't want the size to be very big at all. Something between five and ten should be sufficient. Soften is going to soften the effect that a little bit. If you want a slightly harsher look, you can wind back the softening, but I've got it about four pixels. Now, the shading is critical. This is all about why we have this perception that this text is going to be raised off the surface. I'm going to show you in a minute a photograph that's going to indicate exactly why we're using these angles. But we want the light to come in from the top corner here or from over here, it doesn't really matter, but it needs to come in from the top somewhere. I prefer it to come in from the top-left, so that's what I'm doing here, so I've got an angle. With this particular effect, we've also got an altitude. Somewhere between having the angle at about 135-ish, you want to start bringing in the altitude. Because the further you bring in the altitude, the more rounded this effect gets until you're overhead where the sun's overhead, and it goes flat again. You want to be working around a midpoint for the altitude here, say about 42 degrees, something like that. It's really rough. This is not rocket science and about 135 something for the angle. Now, the Gloss Contour is going to be at an angle like this, that's just fine. But the Highlight Mode that I've got right now is a yellow and that's not going to work, and I'm going to tell you why. The problem with this is that we're going to add a yellowy color to the highlights, which will be fine if we continue to work with an orange background. But if we decide we don't like the orange background, then we're going to end up with yellow highlights, if we've got a blue background. It's probably not going to look particularly good. We don't want to have to come in here just to change the highlights because we changed the color. The best highlight to use is neutral gray. I'm going to click on the highlight color here and I'm going to select a light color, but I want it to be gray and not yellow. When it's gray, it's going to operate as a highlight, but it's also going to be color independent so I can go on top of blue, or green, or whatever. That's an important thing to think of when you're talking about highlights and shadows is quite often using gray instead of a color, will mean that you can build a solution that can be changed without having to come in and change little things like highlights and shadows all the time. Again, I'm going to look at these in a minute when I finish the rest of the effect. The rest of the effect is getting rid of the white text. I just want the bumps, but not the color. We do that by clicking here on Blending Options. What we're going to do is we're going to reduce the Fill Opacity to zero. Now you can see the highlights and the shadows, and you can say this is embossed effect. The reason why we fill a layer with color and then remove the fill from it is that these Layer Styles can't be applied to an empty land. We have to have something for these highlights and shadows to be applied too. We've put our text on this layer, and what we're saying to Photoshop is we want to borrow all these lovely effects, but we don't want the color. So we're just removing the fill from that layer at this point because you can now see what the final effect is going to look like in go back to your bevel and emboss and make changes to it. If you don't have enough highlight or if you have too much highlight, then you can adjust the screen here. The highlight blend mode is set to scream because that's always going to lighten. Then we've got our shadows. Well, you can have really harsh shadows or you can have much softer shadows. That's really going to be a choice that you're going to make, and it's an aesthetic choice if you like, and depth as well. Once you've got what you like, just click "Okay," and then you have your embossed effect in Photoshop. Of course this is fully editable. We can go back in and we could change the text, we could resize it. There is nothing here that is not fully editable and we can also change the background color here. Let's go and get a different color. I'm just going to put on a really heavy blue. In this case, I'll press "Control" "Backspace"," Command" "Delete" on the Mac, to fill the background layer with my color. You can see here because we're using that gray, that we're getting a really nice highlight that does not need to be edited simply because we changed the background color. 3. Pt 2 Understanding Light: In the last video, I was very careful about the angle of the light that we use to create an embossed effect, and we're going to look at the reason for using that kind of light angle. This is a footprint in the sand. It's a photograph that I downloaded from Morguefile, and we're going to use it here to understand our perception of light and how lighting can affect whether we see something as pushed in or raised above the surface. This is a very typical footprint in the sand. We think of it as being a dent in the sand because there is this shadow here. We're used to low light coming from the sun. It's coming from up the top if you like. If it were shining from the top, then we would see this as a shadow because the sun would come to here, and then there would be a dip, and this edge here would cast a shadow. Then the sun would catch the light on the far side of the footprint. We've got light here where the sunlight is catching the very edge of this impressed footprint. But shadow here and the darker the shadow, the deeper of the shadow we're reading this as being a more dented piece of sand. There's a bigger dent here than there is here because there's a really deep shadow here. This footprint is registering, correct for us, everything to do with the light in this photograph is reinforcing our understanding that when you walk on wet sand, you're going to make dents in the sand. But let's see what happens if we rotate the image 180 degrees. In this case, with throwing our brains out of work a little bit. What we're seeing in this image, and what we know of water and footprints and sand on the beach, we've got some disagreement here because the image looks as if this is a raised footprint, but we know it should be a dented one. It should be an imprint into the sand. The reason why it looks raised is because of this light issue. We perceive light as coming in from the top of something because that's where sunlight comes from. If sunlight comes in from the top, then it just hits something to make a highlight. We know from our visual experience of walking around every day that when we say I highlighted because something sticking up, so there is a raised area here. Even though it's not raised, it looks like it's raised because of this light. Here, it looks like there's a raise there, and then the sun is casting a shadow because that's what we're used to seeing in mountains and buildings. That when things stick up on the opposite side to the sun, there's a shadow. Brains are reading this as a raised footprint, even though there's another part of assets going, this is not possible because when you have footprints in the sand, they are dense. But we can harness this knowledge of light to be able to create emboss and deboss effects provided we can put the light in a place where our brains understand that what they're supposed to be seeing is something that's raised or something that is impressed. This is a way of creating a raised effect when we have the sun coming in or the light coming in and hitting a raised surface here. When we look at it this way, then we're getting an impressed effect. We're saying that there's a pressed in area, there's a dent in the sand here. This is the effect that we're going to create with emboss and deboss effects, and we're doing it by creating the perception of something that's raised because, of course, all we're doing is operating on a flat computer screen. We're not actually creating emboss and deboss effects. We're just creating something that looks as if it is an emboss or deboss effect. 4. Pt 3 Shape Emboss Effect: It's also possible to apply this and Boston effect to shapes. I've got a document here created already with just a straight filled background. I'm going to use the shapes tool in Photoshop. I'm going to click here on the custom shape tool. I'm going to make sure that I have shapes selected and white set as my current foreground color. That's particularly important in earlier versions of photoshop because that's going to be the fill color for your shape. Now, I'm just going to select a simple shape here. The one that I've selected to use is this one here. If you don't see the shapes, you can just click the fly-out menu and just click All, and then just click Append. That will append all the shapes to your collection, and you should have this shape because it is shipped with photoshop, so it's going to click on it to target it. I'm going to hold the shift key as I drag out my shape, the shift key will constrain it to the proportions that it was initially designed to be in. Now because this is a shape, I can just move it around, and we're going to apply the exact same Bevel and embossed to the shape layer that we did earlier. So going to the affects icon, and we'll choose Bevel and emboss. At this point you can apply the previous settings or you can make some changes. So you may want to increase the depth a little bit. You may want to increase the size to make it a little bit larger because you'll have to have a reasonable depth to be able to get a good effect with that. The softness is going to soften the edge or not. You'll probably want to stick with light fairly similar to the light that we had earlier. So it's coming in from this direction, highlighting here, shadowing here, and giving this sort of dimensional effect to the shape. I've still got my gray and my black selected here as my highlight and shadow colors. Pretty much once you set them, they're going to stay in place until you change them. So that's really handy and that you don't have to continually come in and change those colors. Now we're going back to blending options because we want to get rid of this white will want to get rid of most of the white. So what we can do here is just dial down the fill capacity, but we don't have to get rid of it all because it's white. It's sort of going to blend in to the background so it's going to give us the perception of a slightly lighter shape than the background, but it's really blended into the background. Choosing white or a very light gray as your fill color gives you the ability to not have to go all the way down to a zero fill capacity. You can actually still keep some of that white color, but just not all of it. So I've got 10 percent here and let's click okay. So we have this visual effect of this shape being raised above the background. If I turn it off, you can just see the outline of the shape. If I turn it back on again, you're saying this raised effect. But since we learned in the previous video about the direction of light, let's take a quick look at what happens if we change the light on their shapes and going back to the bevel in emboss and I'm going to swing the light so it's coming from the opposite direction. Now we're going to have potentially a different impression of this image. We may well see this as a the embossed shape that is actually pressed into a surface rather than raised above it because we're saying the shadows where we were seeing those shadows on the footprint on the page, and that is suggesting to us that this is actually a pressed in effect, not a raised effect. Simply by changing the direction of the light, you can change the impression of the raised or depressed effect. 5. Pt 4 Understanding Knockouts: In the next video, we're going to have a look at creating a Deboss or pressed in effect that has a texture in it, but the concept that we're going to use to get the effect is called a knockout and it's a little bit confusing. So I thought that we would have a look at the knockout effect first, so that when we use it in the next video is going to be a bit more familiar to you. So what I've got here is just a photograph of a cheetah. I'm going to add a new layer to this image, and I'm just going to fill this layer with black. It doesn't matter what color it's filled with, that's totally immaterial. I'm going to add a new layer, and I'm going to add a white filled circle. So I'm just going to create a circle here, and white is my background color so I press "Control Backspace," that would be Command Delete on the Mac to fill my circle with white, and I'll deselect the selection. So right now I have a movable circle on a layer by itself, it's white. I have a black filled layer and I've got my cheetah, and none of these color layers are important at all, doesn't matter what color they are. So let's have a look and see what a knockout effect is. With this top-most layer selected, I'm going to the fx icon and I'm going to Blending Options, and I'm going to set the knockout here to Shallow. It could also be Deep. It doesn't matter for this image, Shallow or Deep will work exactly the same, and I'm going to reduce the Fill Opacity on this layer so that we remove the color, and look what happens. When we use this knockout effect and remove the fill from the layer, what we're doing is effectively punching a hole in this black layer and being able to see the cheetah image underneath, and when I move it around, it's sort of acting like a spotlight over the image underneath, and it's the knockout effect that's doing this. The fact that this is a background layer is critical. Let see what happens when I convert this background layer into a regular layer. Well we lose the cheetah image in the background. It's critical that this layer is a background layer, for us to be able to see this background layer through the whole that we effectively just punched in the image. So we can make a irregular layer back into a background layer by selecting it and choose Layer, New, Background From Layer. So we need a background layer. We've got a fill layer here, which is giving us this black surround, but it could be any color at all. let's go and make it red. Doesn't matter what color it is, it's going to have the same effect, and we've got a filled shape here. Again, it doesn't matter what fill it is because we've set the fill to zero, but we've got this knockout effect applied to it with this knockout shallow or knockout deep, and that's allowing this to punch a hole in the red layer below so that we can see the background layer through it. So we're going to use this effect when we create a Deboss effect with a pattern in it, and we're going to do that in the next video. 6. Pt 5 Shape Deboss with Pattern: The next effect we're going to create something that looks a bit like this. But I thought it would help to be able to say what it is that we're aiming for because there are quite a few steps to putting this together. I'm going to create a brand new document and it's going to be square because the shape that I'm using is square. I want to fill the background layer here with my current background colors so I press, "Control backspace", that would be command to delete on the Mac. I'm going to bring my last palette out here so we can see it. I want to put a pattern on top of this layer. But to do so, I need to convert the background to regular lab, but just temporarily, so you can do that however, you convert background layers into regular layers. I'm just going to click on the lock icon to do that, in earlier versions of Photoshop, you might need to double-click on the layer and then just press, " OK". Now I'm going to the fx icon here. I'm going to select pattern overlay. The pattern I'm using is this sort of pattern of squares. If you don't say it in your pattern list here, you can click this gear icon and choose patterns and then just click, "Append". It's in the Patterns Group. I've got it in here a few times, I'm just going to select it. I've set the blend mode to multiply this is what it looks like regularly. But if you choose multiply, it will blend into the turquoise or the color layer you have already in use. I've just dropped down the opacity a little bit just to blend it in, I'll click "Okay". Now at this point, if we remember the knockout video, we know that this has to be a background layer for us to be able to use it as a knockout. I need to convert this to a Background Layer. Layer, New background from layer that just flattens always affects into a single locked background layer. Now we'll add a new layer and again, fill that with a blue color with control backspace. That would be command Delete on the Mac. I'm going to select the custom shape tool. I'm going to make sure that I've selected shape here in earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll have three icons here, select the shape one. From the shapes list, I have chosen one of the shapes that ship with Photoshop, this one here it's leaf ornament one. If you don't see it to select it, you can just click this gear icon and just select all and append those, and that will be all the shapes including these leaf ornaments. I'll hold the Shift key as I drag out the shape because it's pretty near square. I'm just going to size it to fit in this document. Now to create a knock-out effect, we know that we need to apply it to this shape layer. I click the fx icon and I'm going to choose Blending Options. We'll drop the fill opacity all away down and we're going to set the knockout to shallow. Now this is the opposite effect that we saw earlier. Just going to click "Okay" here. You can see here that the effect is that we've got this solid color around the outside and the pattern showing through the middle. Here, it's the other way round. Before we go and apply our Bevel and Emboss, we're going to solve this problem. What I'm going to do is open up the paths palette here and click on the Shape Layer. Because we chose to create a shape, we have a path. I'm going here to the Path Selection Tool and I'm going to click on my path. When you have a path selected, you can invert it. Right now, the white areas of a sort of filled areas, well, we want to invert that. I'm going here to this set of icons they called the path operations, and I'm going to choose subtract front shape. Effectively, what that does is to invert my shape so that what was filled previously is now not filled and what was not filled is now filled. We've inverted the shape, and you can see that we're getting closer to the look of things that we want to create. I can just click a tool to deselect my path. Again with the shapes selected, we can go ahead now and create this, the boss effect, and in this case we're going to do it with a different tool. We're going to use inner shadow. I'll click, "Add Layer Style " and I'll choose inner shadow. Now the inner shadow color I'm using is a black. It could be a dark gray, it doesn't really matter. But again, if we want some flexibility with color, we'll want to make it a black or gray a neutral color. I have the opacity set to a low value, it's about 14 percent, something like that. I have the angle set to somewhere around 130 that will bring the light in from here casting a shadow, suggesting that the pattern layer is below the solid color layer. I've got a distance here set to about 27 pixels. The larger the distance, the deeper the sort of cut out effect, and the smaller the distance you're going to get more like a the [inaudible] effect, a little bit less like a cut out effect. You can just work between those settings. I'm going to go [inaudible] on this one, so I'm going to set the distance to quite a small value, maybe about eight or 10. I've got zero set for choke and size I've got about 10 pixels. Doesn't need to be a really big shadow so I think about 10 pixels, so this is a pretty good setting and contours is just as it should be in that dialogue. That's the default from the dialogue. You can just finesse these settings if you need to, and then click," Okay". Now we have this sort of [inaudible] look with a pattern behind it and in the final video, we're going to create that effect with text. Again, it's going to be pretty much what we've done so far. Only in this case, we're going to be working with text. 7. Pt 6 Emboss and Deboss Text with a Pattern: Create a Debosss text effect, we're going to do pretty much what we've been doing up until now and make a document 1200 pixels by 800 pixels in size. I'm going to fill it with my blue color here and I'm going to apply that pattern to it. Again, I'm going to convert my background layer into a regular layer. I'll click the effects icon. I'm going to use the same pattern overlay. You can adjust the size of the pattern with the scale, so you may want to choose something a little bit smaller. I'll make mine a little bit darker too. So I'll click okay. Again, I want this to be a regular background layer, I'll choose layer new, background from layer. I'll add a new layer and fill that again with my solid color, and then I'll add a text layer on top. I'm using Myriad Pro bold because that's a nice big thick font because I want to be able to see the pattern through it. Let's type the word dream enlarged text. Now we can apply our knock-out effect with the text layer selected. Click the fx icon and go to blending options. Here, we're going to drop the fill opacity down to zero, and we're going to click the knockout options and choose shallow or deep and click okay. We're saying here the knock-out effect, which was showing through the text the pattern underneath, that's the way round that I want it to be. I want to be able to say that pattern through the text, but I will show you in a minute how you could invert it exactly the same way as we did the shape if you wanted the effect would be the other way round. Now, we also need to create our Deboss effects on going to the fx icon and I'm going to use an inner shadow. With the inner shadow, I have it set to multiply on a dark color is going to increase the opacity, so it's a little bit more intense. I'm going to bring the distance down so that we get this Deboss effect rather than a totally cut out effect and reduce the size a little bit as well. I've got the angle set to about a 127, again, light coming in from the top of the document giving us this pressed in look. Now, you can also add an inner glow. We're going to do that. I'm just going to click on inner glow. I've got a gray here selected as my color, that nice neutral color, so it would allow me to change my colors without needing to change the inner glow color. I've got it set to color burn, but multiply would work as well to turn this inner glow into more like a shadow effect rather than a lightning effects that's less glow more shadow. I've got the opacity set to a fairly low value, about 10, be pretty good and I've got the source set to center. You've got some options here, edge or center, and you can work between the two. You can decide which of them you like better. Actually, I'm thinking today I'm liking edge better so maybe I'll go with edge. Set the choke to a very small value and size to a fairly small value as well. But you see that there are a number of options for getting these effects playing around with options such as bevel and emboss, inner shadow and inner glow and remembering that inner glow doesn't have to be a glow, it can actually be a shadow effect, if you use multiply or color burns something like that, it ends up darkening rather than lightening. Let's click okay. There is my deboss effect with a pattern. But if you wanted it to be the other way round, so you saw clear inside and pattern on the outside. Let's go and see how we do that. Select my type and with my type layer selected, I'm going choose convert to shape, and that turns this into a shape layer. When we go to the paths palette, we're going to see the text as a shape in exactly the same way as we saw the shape as a shape earlier. I'm going to make sure I have selected the past selection tool, which gives me access to these options including subtract front shape. When I click subtract front shape, I get the reverse effect that this time the text looks like it's on top of the pattern because of the way the light is falling. But you can say that when you've got text or shapes, it's possible to invert this knock-out effect to get whatever it is that you want to get in terms of an effect. Now at this point we've got some raised text. If we wanted it to be in set , we're going to need to give up inner shadow and inner glow. I'll double click on the effects option, and this time I'm going to use a drop shadow, so I'll click to add the drop shadow and click on the drop shadow, I want to reduce the opacity here, down the size and spread and just get a subtle drop shadow effect here with the light coming in from the top corner again to reinforce that pressed in look. I hear my settings are about 40 percent on the blend mode, a distance of about three pixels. The spread is about 17 and the size is about five. You could also add an outer glow, so let's just add that got mindset to a really light color. But I am going to choose a neutral gray here and set the blend mode to multiply or color burn. If I back off the size and the spread here, I'll be able to reinforce this effect. Now, it's going to be fairly subtle, but it's also helping us to get the debossed effect here, where it looks like this solid type is being inset into this pattern filled shape. 8. Pt 7 Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the effects that you've seen here, either the deboss or the emboss effect with or without this knockout pattern. Post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've learned things that you didn't know about Photoshop in this class. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.