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harroldsheep — TUTORIAL: Starship lettering in five easy steps
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Published: 2014-08-03 16:17:49 +0000 UTC; Views: 971; Favourites: 17; Downloads: 38
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Description
a little Photoshop tutorial to help out creating the NCC and badging for starships. initially made to help out Jimlogan1701 .the Arc tool is not the greatest, it tends to make a mess of this font when using font sizes smaller than 100; the outlines merging to the letters. you can see some this already on the zero letter in the "finished" frame at the end.
i should have used a larger number than "100" in this example, sorry!
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Comments: 5
For me this technique is good as a general layout when I place individual letters. Otherwise I always seem to get some odd warping (no pun intended) in the letters when I use Arc on fonts. The top part gets bunched up and the bottom gets stretched.
For better spacing on your outlines, I'd suggest using Edit/Stroke instead of modifying layers. Black lettering as the base, Stroke for the outline (not Layer Style but the toolbar menu Edit/Stroke). Set your color and pixel width, select Location as Outside. First apply in white, then again in red.
It's easier with the Microgamma font, but if you're using TMP Starship Hull font it might be easier to rasterize the layer, use Magic Wand tool to select and then delete the outline. THEN use the Edit/Stroke method I described.
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for example: the red lining for the "0", the bottom of the inside part is too close to the black. this means, i would have to start again with a larger sized font. OR go back in, extract just that part in a separate layer, and do a little nudging.
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i agree! i have to use something like a 400+ size font to make the initial lettering, but even at 300 dpi and scaled up that big, the darn Magic Wand would still sometimes grab the whole letter, outline and all. grrrrr!
Arc needs to be re-written, IMHO.
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When that happens I set Magic Wand to 3-5% or so. That usually works for me.
-edit-
Oh wow, we can edit our own comments now! When was that put in?
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it probably would have worked if i had used something greater than the 100 font size i used in my example.
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