Juvenall Wilson

Looking to add a little “bling” to your text/logos? With a few simple Photoshop filters and about 4 minutes, you can produce something just like this and solidify your G-Unit membership (purple suit not included.)

(Note, I’m too lazy to add images right now. Give me a day or two and I’ll toss em’ in)
With Photoshop open, create a new document. For this effect to work well, we’ll need something at least 600 x 600. As soon as your canvas is created, reset your colors to the defaults by simply pressing the “d” key. This should set your foreground color to black and your background white. We’re now ready to get down to work.

Since we’re now pimps, we like things bigger than big. So we’re going to need to pick a huge font size. Something in the 150px to 250px range should work perfectly. Once set, grab the type tool from the toolbar and enter the text you want to bling. For the sake of simplicity, try to center it on the page and make sure you leave a little room on the sides for the rest of what we’ll be doing. If you need more space, what do you think you should do before we go on? If I need to explain that to you, hang yourself right now.

I can hear you right now. “Ohh, unremarkable text. How exciting.” Bitch! We ain’t done yet! Before you can really pimp this out, we need to rasterize the text layer. There are many ways to do this, but we’re just going to right click on our text layer in the layers palate and click on, *shock*, “rasterize text”. Well done sparky. Since we’re still over our text layer, we’ll make our life simple by pressing and holding ctrl and clicking on the layer. For the slow, this will outline the content of the layer. This will help us isolate the effects we’ll be adding next.

Here’s were we get to the magic. Move up to the Filters menu and go to “Render” and click on “Render Clouds”. Do this a few times until you get a good balance of dark and light colors. If you don’t, the end product will a little retarded and that’s just not pimp. When you’re happy, go back to the Filters menu and under “Distort”, click on “Glass”. On the filter window that pops up, set distortion to “20″, smoothness to “1″ and for texture, use “tiny lines” with a scale between 50-60% (done to taste). Hit OK and that’s it, we’ve now blinged out our text. Now it’s time to add a little trim.

Looking back to your layers palate, double click on the text layer to bring up the Layer Style dialog box. Here, you’ll want to first check “Stroke”. Again, pick something big like 10px or more. Still in the Stroke window, change the “fill type” to “gradient and than double click on the default pattern to bring up the Gradient Editor window. You don’t need to do a lot here, so just click on one of the defaults you think adds the most bling (”Orange, Yellow, Orange” and “Copper” work best) and hit OK.

With the outline in place, lets give it a bit of dimension by clicking on “Bevel and Emboss”. Under the first drop down box, change the type to “Stroke Emboss”. The settings directly below that can be adjusted to taste, but I find setting “Depth” to 1000%, “Size” to 10 and “Soften” to 0 gives the best results. If you want to get really fancy, you can change the color listed under “Shadow Mode” on this page to another color that works with your outline. Who am I kidding, we’re pimps now, we love getting fancy. When you’re done, OK your changes in the Layer Style window, add a dark background color under you image and you could call it quits here if you’re lazy.

The last step here is to give it a little shine. So from your toobar, grab the paint brush and move up to where you can change your brush settings. From here, you’re going to search for a brush that has a “star” pattern. Just under that patter is the brush we’ll be using. Pick it, then set your foreground color to white. Now just start clicking around your image to add little light reflections to taste.

All you need is a big fat gold chain to hang this on and you’re set.