Rainbow Text

In this tutorial, you are going to make this image:

Start with a new image  roughly 300 X 150 X 16 million colors .  Using your text tool , Add some text to your image with your foreground color set to white.  I used Black Chancery set at 48 point with the text "Net Sisters".  Do not deselect the Text.  Your image should look like the one to your left.

Now, click on Selections--> Save to Alpha Channel.  A screen will appear that resembles this one.  Text you typed may not look the same, but the concept is essentially indenticle.

Now, create a new layer. Select Layers--> New... and name this layer: Rainbow.  Once the Layer Properties window pops open, you will enter your information as the following figure demonstrates.

Once you have entered the information to your right, you will have a new layer over the original layer with nothing in it.   Select Selections from the tep menu, Load from Alpha Channel, and click on the privious selection you saved. You will now see the marching ants appear around the text you put in the original layer, but they will encircle nothing in the rainbow layer. This is your rainbow area. Pick any color you wish to start you rainbow with. I choose a Redish-Orange to start. Using a sweeping 45 degree angle, I made a quick stroke with my airbrush. I then changed colors for my next color. I went from Red to Yellow. Yellow to Green. Green the Light Blue. Light Blue to Dark Blue. Each time, I made sure I overlapped my current color with the previous one just a bit to give the blend effect of a rainbow.

As you can see, the effect also produced Orange, Lime Green, Sea Foam Blue, and Midnight Blue. I know, it doesn't look to Rainbowish now, but we need to adjust the transparency level of the Rainbow layer. This is what the actually rainbow comes from. Like a true rainbow, the raindrops (paint colors) feed on the light (white text) creating a prism (transparency level adjustment), what you see when you look at a rainbow is all the colors of the light shining through the raindrops. Since white is all colors combind, the prism, raindrop, seperates it into the actual make up of the colors. Following this Mr. Wizard explanation is how to set the transparency of your rainbow.

Go to your layers pallet.  On your rainbow layer, adjust the transparency level to something that suites what you want.  I used 51 here which created this nice image:  The colors bled nicely into the white background which gave the impression of a rainbow casting reflection off the letters.  OK, you can go further if you want.  You can use Eye Candy to give it a glossy glow, blade pro to set it in a glassed effect, or use plain old PSP to give it a drop shadow and make it "pop" off the page. Here, we will give it a drop shadow to give it A: Height  B: Texture  C: Depth

OK, create a new layer named Drop Shadow. As I have done here.  Click on Selections-->Load from Alpha Channel. Select the entry you have made which would be the original selection.  Now, Hit Image-->Effects-->Drop Shadow.  The following Popup screen will appear.  Enter the attributes as I did here.  Make sure you are in the Drop Shadow layer first. You can adjust and play with the settings, but these ones give you a nice clean crisp drop shadow that creates the illusion of your graphic popping off the page. The above image is not the same as what I was doing here, I changed the colors a bit so you could see the difference a little color creates.  The image below shows what your finished image will look like, or at least what it can look like.  Since everyone is different, and there really is no right or wrong way to do things, every artist that lives inside of each of you will create something different. Following the above guide to a Tee still won't produce this image.  Changing your Brushes for your airbrush will create an even more different image.  If you use the Luner brush with your painting of your "rainbow", you will get a kind of rippling effect on the face of your image.  If you use the Woodgrain brush, your image will take on the effect of running water with colors in it.  Last, but surely not least.  You must combine the layers before you save as gif, jpg, tif, bmp, or anyother format except for PSP, or PSD. Those two formats accept the use of layers within an image, but will not display on your webpage, so please keep this in mind, or you may end up with an image that only shows one of your layers.