Hello.  It's been quite awhile since I have added anything new to the action section.  Things have been pretty busy.  Anyway, I have received quite a few emails about the Chrome and Gold actions that are listed on the Visual Reference page and I thought I should update this section before it collects too much more dust.  So, this is where I will begin again after almost a year, with the Chrome and Gold Action.

I have seen many different ways in Photoshop of creating surfaces such as gold, chrome, glass, water, metal and any other texture or surface that reflects or refracts light.  These surfaces are definitely the most challenging thing an artist will ever attempt to create, because the overall look of the object or surface is so much influenced by it's surroundings.

This action was inspired by those little chrome plates on the back of cars that tell you what kind of car the person in front of you is driving.  You know the ones that are reflecting the sun directly into your eyes at 7:00 in the morning during rush hour traffic.

This one uses only stock Photoshop filters such as emboss, difference clouds, Guassian blur and curves.  The Gold action is pretty much the same action, except, I use different values in curves to give it a gold tint instead of the blue used in Chrome.  When your doing metal and other high contrast surfaces, curves come in real handy.  If you look through the history (remember to keep your history steps at about 100) you will see how curves was used to convert a matte surface to a highly polished chrome surface.  The black and white image at the right is what the original looked like.  If you click on it, you can view and download the full size version to try this out for yourselves.

Now, the action can only go so far.  This one will need a bit of help from you.  As you can see in the final image, there are some reflections and glares that you would expect to see in a chrome surface.  For the reflections, I created duplicate layers of the chrome object and resized and bent it around different parts of the letters.  You will have to fade and trim these to make them look right.  For the glares I used the paint brush tool and a couple of different brush shapes and painted them on separate layers.  I painted with the round brush first and then added the flare brush on top of the round shape using white.  You will find the flare brush in your goodies folder under the Photoshop program files folder.  Load that into your brushes pallet if it is not already there.  You can also use the lens flare filter to add a bit of realism as well.

Image with no glare.

Image with round brush painted in white.

Image with flare brush painted over round brush also in white.

Be sure to experiment with different words, different sizes, different shapes and see how it works.  We hope you enjoy these actions.  Email Us or sign our Guest Book and let us know what you think.  Send us some of your final images.  Have Fun!!

The Usual Disclaimer
These actions are created for 72dpi images only and are only guaranteed to work in Photoshop 5.5.  They were also created on a PC, not a MAC. (Please, no more hate mail from MAC users, I like PCs, I'm sorry!)  If you wish to create these effects for a higher resolution, you will need to tear the action apart and redo the steps.