Text Cutout
Start with a nice background, and using the text marquee tool
create a text marquee. Nice big fat text is good. To select the
text marquee tool click and hold on the text icon until the
submenu pops up, then select the text marquee:
Now turn the selection into a channel, click on the channels
tab and then the Create channel from selection button (no. 1).
Now create a copy of the channel. To create a copy of the
channel drag the channel to the new channel icon (no. 2):
Turn of the marquee selection by using Ctrl+D.
With the Alpha 2 channel selected (should be still
selected from doing the copy), Click on Filter -> Blur and select
Gaussian blur. Set a blur value of 0.5. Now select Filter ->
Other and choose Offset. Set the offset values as 1 and 1 and select
Repeat Edge:
Now we want to load the first channel as a
selection. To do this we drag the channel to the load icon. Note: We
want to keep the Alpha 2 Channel selected when we do this.
Press D to select the default colours (or click on
the default colour selector) and then press Delete. Then do Ctrl+D
to remove the selection.
Copy the first channel again as we did in step 2
(no. 2). So you should have an Alpha 3 channel which is a copy of
Alpha 1.
Now with the new channel selected click on Filter
-> Blur and select Gaussian blur, set a value of 2.5. Then click
Filter -> Other and select Offset. Set the values as below:
Select Image -> Adjust and choose Invert, or do
Ctrl+I:
Now load the first channel (while keeping the third
channel selected, as we did in step 4). Click Select -> Inverse
(or Ctrl+Shift+I), select the default colours (or press D) and then
press Delete.
Use Ctrl+D to remove the selection.
Select the RGB channel and then click back to the
layers tab. Create a new layer:
Go back to the channels tab and load the first layer
(like we did in step 4). We want to fill this with 20% back. To do
this we select the Bucket Fill tool (no. 1) and make sure we
have the default colours selected (D). Then set the fill options as
shown:
Now fill the text to get the result below:
And as always use Ctrl+D to turn off the
select.
Now lets repeat the process with the third channel.
Load the third channel and fill with 100% black. So leave the other
fill settings as in step 7, but make sure the Opacity it set to 100%
(press zero as the shortcut for this). Click anywhere on the image
to fill the selection.
Lastly repeat the process again with the second
channel. Load the second channel and will with 100% white, keep the
other fill settings as in step 7. Use D to select the default
colours and then X to switch then around to white becomes the fill
colour. Click anywhere on the image to fill the selection. And
that's it! Hopefully the result is something like:
Optionally if you don't want the background showing
through, just load the first channel, then switch back to the layers
tab and select the background layer, then press Delete. This will
delete the background and leave whatever background colour you have
selected.
You can also skip the 20% fill in step 7 if you
don't want the background to be darker.
Which actually looks a bit like a bevel depending on
how you look at it. For example:
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