Doing bright metallic text is one of the easiest metal looks to do in PSP6, depending on the font and fontsize. Some fonts lend themselves to this technique better than others and you'll have to experiment with settings for each font. For this tutorial I'm using Comic Sans font, which is included with Windows 98 or can be downloaded from the Windows update page if you don't already have it. I'll give a couple of examples of other fonts near the bottom of this page so you can see how they look. As with other pages of this tutorial, all work is done with PSP 6 using no third party filters or plugins.

A note before we start. Blurring is almost always necessary before applying the Chrome effect. This effect makes edges in the image, or selection, look sharper and that almost always interferes with the smoothness of the final result. As with anything you use this effect on, you'll need to experiment some with settings and with the amount of blur. I've found that in most cases a Gausian blur of 1 or 2 is usually enough but trial and error is the key to good shiny metallic effects. Ok, let's get started.

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Here I've started a new image, 150 by 75 pixels, and filled the background with the same texture used on this page. I then added two new layers above it, one for the dropshadow and the top layer for the text. I used a font size of 32, White for the color, Floating and Anti-alias on.

The next step is to center your text and use Effects/Inner Bevel with the "metallic" preset. The only setting I changed was making the direction of the light come from 45 degrees. Next go to Effects/Blur and apply a Gausian blur of 1 and you have what you see at the left.

Now it's time to make our text shiny. Go to Effects/Chrome. The default settings don't look very shiny so change the Flaws setting to 4 and you'll get this look. This is where you'll need to experiment if you are using a different font or font size. You can also change the Brightness setting at this point, if you wish.

I left it at the default of 50 and I wouldn't go higher than 65 in this step. Again, experiment, but I think you'll find anything over 65 is just too much for now. The next step is to adjust brightness and contrast until you're happy with the result. Go to Color/Adjust/Brightness and Contrast.

Normally I would use settings of 5 for brightness and 15 for contrast and repeat until I was satisfied. In this case I used 10 and 25 and applied twice to get the result at right. If silver is what you want, you're done with the text and all that's left is to defloat, leaving the text selected, and change to the empty layer below to add a dropshadow and you're ready to save.

If you want copper, gold or any other color you can now use Color/Colorize to make it the color you like. For the copper color use settings of 20 for hue and 226 for saturation (*note; for the copper text in the banner at the top of the page I used my normal 5 and 15 settings when I adjusted brightness and contrast, applied twice. Here, I used the settings above but applied it only once.Copper looks best if it's not so bright. Gold might also). For the gold I used 35 for hue and 226 for saturation.

That's all there is to it for text. Much of what I've said here will apply to any image or selection. Below are three different fonts in different colors. I like the red. The green and blue, not, but maybe with different colors or different fonts they would look ok. These all look more candy-like than metallic to me. The black bar used on these pages was done with these same tools but with lots of experimenting with settings in both Inner Bevel and Chrome. I think it looks very round and solid.

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