Galaga Style text, a Malenko Photoshop tutorial

[Malenko]

Hey all, figured I'd give teaching a go.  Faking Galaga text is surprisingly easy to do. This is a way I figured out how to do it.
Must note, this is just a way I came up with to accomplish the same effect. Just because this is A way to do it, doesnt mean its the ONLY way to do it.

For this tutorial, I am using Adobe Photoshop CS5 but it'll work with any photo-editing software that has both layers and stroke. This tut covers the font effect, not the font itself.
I also assume you have a rudimentary knowledge of photoshop.


First lets remember what the Galaga marquee looks like:


Next, lets remove the Galaga text from the background (this is where I assume you can already do this)

Also, now is a good time to copy that yellow "spark" and paste it on top of itself in a new layer. This will allow you to put the text under the spark where ever you want without having to worry about trimming around it later.

Next we add the text. Text color doesnt really matter, you can make it one of the final colors to make 1 step easier, but I just left it black.

notice that you can see a photoshop dialog box to the bottom right. This isnt part of the image but Im not a professional so Im not going to bother photoshopping out stuff like that

Here is where things get a little more...tricky.
You will need to right click the text layer (in my example it is called BYOAC) and rasterize the layer. Only do this step AFTER you are happy with the front size, shape, etc because any transformation of the font after this will add artifacts and other irregularities to the text.


Ok, so the color bands around the Galaga font in the factory marquee are black , orange, and red. In that order starting from the inside out.
You will now want to right click the text layer and "duplicate layer" each time you dupicate it, rename it "text - Black" ,"text - Orange" , and "text - red"
You should have a total of 6 layers. The background, Text , text- black , text-orange , text-red, top spark (if you duplicated the spark)

Its important that the layers be in this order!
Black is on top because the black stroke has to be on top of the orange, which has to be on top of the red. It'll make more sense at the end, I promise
The names are just so you know which stroke color goes on which layer. the default text can go anywhere under the top layer, its just there in cause you mess up a layer, you can just recopy the original. If youre ballsy or confident, you can safely delete this layer.

Next step is to make the font have a light green top and a dark green bottom.
text-black is the text layer on top, so thats the layer we will be coloring. Coloring any other layer wont matter because the text-black would be on top of it covering the colored font with the black. On the text-black layer, just use the paint bucket to fill it in with the top green color. If the paint bucket wont fill in the text, you have to right click it and rasterize the layer.

I know it looks silly, and you might have some weirdness along the edges, thats fine.

Next step is to slice a line out of the middle. So grab your rectangular marquee tool (the dotted box icon) and put a box around the area you want to be black in the middle, then select the magic lasso icon, hold alt and click in the white area. This will select a straight line along just where the font is.

Just grab the pencil tool and color in the selection black

Then use the paint bucket to fill in the bottom of the font with the darker green color:

Its starting to come together, right?

Next step is to double click the layer to bring up the layer style dialog box. Select stroke (at the bottom) and make the stroke roughly the same size as the black line in the middle of the text.


We are just going to repeat the "double click layer style dialog" for the remaining layers, making the stroke look the same size on each layer. starting with orange:


and finally red:


Your layer box should look something like this:




That pretty much does it, once you have the strokes uniform and you are happy with them, you can then merge all the text layers into 1 and put it where you want on the marquee.



An alternate slightly more advanced way would be to add the black stroke to the text after making it 2 greens with the black in the middle, then rasterize the effect, then stroke that with orange, rasterize the effect layer again, and finally stroke it with red. Totally fine way to do it, but I think keeping the strokes on separate layers makes editing them much easier.


Feedback is appreciated, and if you use this tutorial to make anything, I'd love to see it!

[BorgDog]

Hey cool.  I don't have Photoshop, use paint.net and this got me to find a plugin to do the stroke effect (called outline).  Not going to use for my arcade projects that I know of, but was going to add some border around some irregular images and now I know how to do it!  Thanks.     not everything worked the same in paint.net but it was close enough for me to figure it out.

my crude first attempt attached.

[yotsuya]

Very nice, bro. I love tutorials like this. Easy to follow.

[Malenko]

borg thats perfect, thanks for posting!

[opt2not]

Very nice tutorial! 
Yeah, that's a solid way of doing it. Though personally I try not to ever rasterize my fonts if possible, because I tend to want to keep my files as non-destructive as I can so that re-sizing/re-using it in the future would be clean and easy.

Let me introduce you guys to the wonderful world of Layer Clipping Masks.

Description from Photoshop Help:

"A clipping mask lets you use the content of a layer to mask the layers above it. The masking is determined by the content of the bottom or base layer. The non-transparent content of the base layer clips (reveals), the content of the layers above it in the clipping mask. All other content in the clipped layers is masked out."

By adding a clipping mask, you can just "draw" on top of the Base layer, which would save you from having to rasterize your fonts.

Normally to do this, create your font, then go to Layer-->New Layer (or hit Ctrl+Shift+N), and tick the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask.


This would put a raster layer on top of your Font and an arrow would be connecting it indicating that it's a Clipping Mask layer.  Now you can fill the layer with as many colours you want, draw on it, gradient, whatever you want to do to that layer and it'll be separate from your original font layer. You can also add as many layers as you want  as well. Notice that the layer is completely filled, but is clipped out from the font being the base layer:


Now for your Galaga example, I would go the completely non-destructive method, seeing that it's just a hard edged colours. I would use Shape Layers (which are vector shapes) instead so I can make sure that re-sizing isn't going to be destructive. You can convert any layer to a Clipping Mask under Layer-->Create Clipping Mask (or Alt+Ctr+G).
So what I'd do is create a few rectangular shapes in the various colours you need, place them in the positions you want on top of the font:


Then for each one, I'd convert them to Clipping Masks:


Add a stroke to the base font, and voila, a non-destructive set of layers:


One last thing I'd do is put them into a Group or convert them all into one Smart Layer (which is a container for layers, but has the added bonus of being able to add Styles, Smart Filters or additional clipping masks to them).
You can then resize these to your hearts content and you'll never have any problems with blurry scaling artifacts.

[yotsuya]

I wish we had more tutorial posts like this. 

[opt2not]

A magician can't show all his tricks

[Malenko]

Very nice tutorial! 
Yeah, that's a solid way of doing it. Though personally I try not to ever rasterize my fonts if possible, because I tend to want to keep my files as non-destructive as I can so that re-sizing/re-using it in the future would be clean and easy.

Let me introduce you guys to the wonderful world of Layer Clipping Masks.

Yeah that's a great and a much better way of doing it. I just didnt think I should start off beginner tutorials with clipping masks.
I guess next tutorial I do I wont leave it so generalized and use more photoshop features and techniques. I tried to make it using basics so people who use gimp and paint.net could do it but I think I might be making it more complex by making it so simple, and odds are if they are using gimp or paint.net that dont really need a PS tut.

Awesome post though, and you made it with so many fewer screen shots 

[opt2not]

I hear ya, but that's not what they teach in schools. You learn clipping masks right off the bat because it's generally "the right way" of learning to be a digital graphic artist. It's a staple.

[Malenko]

I hear ya, but that's not what they teach in schools.

yeah that's a big caveat of being self taught   Nothing but online tutorials and magazines with a heaping dose of trial and error!

[opt2not]

But with that being said, your method is solid because the same steps can be used for all types of different effects.

There are times I don't even bother going vector, especially if it's art that needs more gradations rather than hard-edged shading or colouring.
Heck, to get the multiple layered outlines, I sometimes just rasterize the multiple layers and throw Strokes or Glows on 'em.

Like you said, there are multiple ways of doing any art.

I wish we had more tutorial posts like this. 

But seriously, I wouldn't mind putting more tutorials up like this, if I have some spare time. Maybe it just takes posts like this for me to speak up...But, we have a ton of tutorials/tips on the construction side of these projects, but when it comes to artwork there isn't much on here. Obviously a lot can be googled and youtube'd, but there's a lot of general stuff out there that doesn't focus specifically on our craft.

[yotsuya]

I hear ya, but that's not what they teach in schools. You learn clipping masks right off the bat because it's generally "the right way" of learning to be a digital graphic artist. It's a staple.

Holy ---smurfing--- ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- that was easy! I've never used clipping masks before, but I sure as heck will now!

[opt2not]

Yeah bro, clipping masks are the ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---!  Just wait till you use Smart Layers...it'll blow your mind!

But like I said, you can make pretty much any layer into a clipping mask. Including Adjustment Layers (which are your image adjustment tools, but contained in a layer). This is really handy when you want a way of isolating the Brightness/Contrast, or Hue/Saturation editing to specific layers.
Give it a try!  You can create adjustment layers under Layer-->New Adjustment Layer.

[yotsuya]

Yeah bro, clipping masks are the ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---!  Just wait till you use Smart Layers...it'll blow your mind!

But like I said, you can make pretty much any layer into a clipping mask. Including Adjustment Layers (which are your image adjustment tools, but contained in a layer). This is really handy when you want a way of isolating the Brightness/Contrast, or Hue/Saturation editing to specific layers.
Give it a try!  You can create adjustment layers under Layer-->New Adjustment Layer.

[BorgDog]

bah, you've gone beyond what paint.net will do... looks like it's time for this old dog to learn some new tricks and take advantage of the photoshop I can get from work.

Thanks for tutorials guys.

So in opt2not's method to add multiple strokes just duplicate the text layer and make increasing size different color strokes right?

Like so:

[opt2not]

So in opt2not's method to add multiple strokes just duplicate the text layer and make increasing size different color strokes right?

Yup, that's one way to do it.

[Malenko]

So in opt2not's method to add multiple strokes just duplicate the text layer and make increasing size different color strokes right?

Yup, that's one way to do it.

thats exactly how I did it too.

[opt2not]

Another (advanced) way that you can do this without having to duplicate the layer a bunch of times, is by switching your Stroke from Color to Gradient  within the Fill Type section of the Layer Style dialog. Be sure to use Shape Burst instead of Linear (which makes the gradient travel outwards from the center of the object):


You can then edit the Gradient itself by clicking on the Black-to-White gradation bar, and put multiple colours in it. For this example I divided up the gradient into thirds for 3 colours. Each colour change happens at Location 33%. Basically you have to put two colour arrows on top of one another to get that hard edge division. If I were using 2 colours, I'd put both colour arrows at 50%, etc...::

You don't have to divide the colours evenly in their position.  If you wanted the outside Cyan to be thicker than the rest, then you can make that happen by changing the position of that colour in this editor.

This is what the Stoke dialog box would look like:

When re-sizing your font, you can update the stroke thickness in case it gets too thin (since the stroke doesn't follow the transformation of affecting layer).

Now add your Shape Layer Clipping Masks, and voila, an optimized set of layers that will make your files much lighter in size, as well allow your computer to run faster (this is significant when you're dealing with a crap load of elements in your file).


I like this way because I tend to use these gradient strokes for more than just the font, and you can save this Gradient pre-set if you wanted to use it on other objects (for instance the funky Galaga border lines). As well, if you wanted to update the overall thickness, you don't have to edit each duplicate layer's stroke value. Just one Stroke to change.

It's an advanced technique, but a bit more optimal when dealing with file management and re-using and editing strokes.

[BorgDog]

This keeps getting better and better.    That gradient way definitely a lot easier to adjust everything once setup.  Hope I'm not the only one getting stoked about this, now I just need to find something to actually use it on so I don't forget everything.

[Vigo]

Hard gradients can also be used as an alternative for the inner fill as well.

[Vigo]

I just wanted to point out that the new 2015 Photoshop now allows you to put down multiple shadow, overlay and stoke effects on a single layer, making the "triple stroke" effect super easy to do. Just go into layer styles, do your first stroke, then press the + button to add another stroke, and repeat again for the third.

Probably one of the best improvements I have seen in photoshop in a while.

[Malenko]

awesome, thanks for the update!