Hi all,

I could need a hand on this little thingy here :)

I attached the photo of a crest here. It's basically pretty nice, but what I want to do is giving me some headaches:

I want to make the crest look as if it was metal. Does somebody know how to achieve this? I mean, to turn a surface into a metal surface it's pretty easy, you just use bevel&emboss to give it some structure and then tweak the curves and voila, metal. But the real problem is "what exactly to apply this effect to". If I apply it to the inside parts only, the black outline looks ridiculous, If I apply to the whole part seems like the paws holding the shield blend together...

My idea is to cut out each piece seperately, then apply the effect and put it all together. The bad part is, I'll be busy doing this for days :(

Does anybody have an idea on how to achieve this a little faster?

Patrick

Hi Patrick
Could you post a image, then the good people here could have a go at it for you and give you some pointers.
Cheers
Romany

Oh cr...umpy, I totally forgot, thanks for pointing me! :)

Here it comes!

Would you happen to have a larger image to work with, it's a little pixelated?
Romany

Here is a very quick way to get a metal look without to much effort. The first thing I did was change to RGB mode then fill the outside area with black to give it a high contrast. Then went to filters/Render/Lighting Effects. I played around with the different lighting effects till I came up with something that looked like metal.

Okay, so maybe this doesn't help much. I cheated. I used EyeCandy 4000 Chrome filter. But first I selected ALL the white areas. At least as much as I could with the low qaulity jpeg . If nothing else it shows what this eyecandy 4000 can do. You can make the bevel real thick. AS I did here. Or you can make it thin.
Pete

The trick is to post the largest image you can while being under 100kb. If you have photoshop use the "save for web" option. At least thats what I do.
Pete

At first, thanks to all of you for your efforts! I love deadants try, it's stupid plain simple but the result is pretty good!

For those of you who are interested I'll tell you what I finally did:

1. Selected all the white areas inside the crest and copied them to a new layer, then disabled the others.

2. Made the white areas 50% gray and applied an inner bevel so it looks like 3d contoured.

3. Then simply tweak with a curves adjustment layer making it look metal, that easy :)

The tricky part was the inner bevel. If I set a big size, the big parts of the image (like the lions bodies) look pretty good but the smaller parts like claws get distorted! See the problem?

My resolution was to actually create three layers for small, medium and large areas (aka claws, banner, claws) and applying different bevel sizes to each one. Then I masked out the areas of each one so at last I got each part of the crest applied with a fitting bevel.

Maybe someone can use this in the future for a similar purpose?

Patrick

I tried your method and it has an interestig effect. How about posting your result.

Sure, this is just a temporary one until I have the final template of the crest with a better resolution (see my other thread)

Patrick

well I've got to say you've got that technique nailed. It looks the business to me. :bow:

That's the current one I just finished. Thanks again to Tony for doing the Illustrator stuff for me!

If this metal thingy is so un-usual, do you (to all) think it's worth a tutorial?

Patrick

I'll be reading it. It's a winner in my books. I can't wait to see your step by step instructions on metalacizing. (is that a word?)

I would def love to see the tutorial on that one! That turned out awesome!

Amber

PatrickB, good method! tnks

Just wanted to tell you it's (finally) online ;)

Here's the link to PatrickB's tutorial.
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=173

Hiya, the best way in my opinion to create a metal FX background is to do this;
Create a new document and give it a black - to white - to black gradient background (at a 45 degree angle on the page). Say top left to bottom right.

In filters, give it loads of monochromatic noise so it goes all speckly and rough.

Then in filters blur got to motion blur and blur the background at the same angle as the gradient with the noise.

You should end up with a really neat effect like brushed steel.
The double cool thing with this is that you can change the colour of the blend to mimic chrome, brass etc. And you can also cut this inside shapes to make them look like they're made out of whatever steely material you want!

patrick,

looks like metal to me, but how did you get all that metal into your monitor?

Craig