With a paint brush in hand, Tina Vaziri is often away having adventures with Mr. Bee. Her travel notes are filled with illustrations, sketches, and stories.

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wood engraving effect | May 23, 2007

Engraving into surfaces can be easily achieved with a few simple steps, mainly, the Layer Styles properties in Photoshop.


    Tools:
  • Adobe Photoshop (CS or higher)
  • An image with a surface that needs engraving
  • Text, a shape, or an object image you want to engrave

Open your surface image in Photoshop, make sure your layers pallet is visible.

  • Create a second layer on top of your original surface layer that contains your shape/text/object.


  • Set this second layer blending mode to Soft Light, at 85% opacity.
  • While still on the second layer, click the Add layer style button that looks like a circle with a “f” in it at the bottom of your layers pallet. This will pop up a new window with many options.

    In the Styles, Blending Options:
    • Check Inner Shadow and click the words Inner Shadow to bring up the menu for it.

    • Set the Blend Mode to multiply, select a dark color that works with your image. Set the opacity at 75%. I chose an angle of 48 with a check by Use Global Lighting. My distance is at 1px, 0% choke, and size of 1px, the contour is linear, no check by Anti-aliased, and no noise.


    • I have set an Outer Glow as well. My setting are at Screen for blend mode, 12% opacity, no noise, a light color swatch, Softer, 8% spread, size of 10px, Contour of sawtooth1, no anti-aliased, range of 41%, no jitter.


    • Check Bevel and Emboss, set the style to emboss, technique to chisel hard, 1% depth, Down direction, 2px size 0px soften. For shading I used a 48 degree angle, use global light at 21 degrees. The gloss contour, I set to Guassian, no anti-aliased, highlight mode I set to 0% and shadow mode I set to 100% Multiply using a dark brown from my illustration.


    • I also used a Texture under the Bevel and Emboss option because a super clean finish would not work with my illustration. These settings are at a 1% scale and depth of -91%, inverted and linked with layer.


    Some of these setting will not work for your illustration/design so feel free to adjust them to fit your work. Experiment with different contour options, different shadows and highlights, and colors to achieve your desired effect. Here is my quick fix finished product:



    Related posts:

    1. glowing magic in photoshop
    2. illustration, design, and marketing
    3. pimp my photoshop filters and plugins
    4. free photoshop brushes
    5. photo editing in photoshop
    6. image displacement mask
    7. brushed metal effect
    8. image out of text
    9. using textures effectively




    Filed under: art & design tutorials


    2 Responses to “wood engraving effect”

    1. Adam Says:

      Nice! I like the Vaziri instructional series. I was actually using the emboss features tonight on some photos, placing my name credit on them. I had to find a lot of this out the hard way. Wish I read this first.

      May 27th, 2007 at 10:15 am


    2. cata Says:

      very usefull and interesting
      Thanks for sharing

      July 19th, 2007 at 9:56 am


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