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Chiseling
Overview Import or set type; adjust spacing; store the type in an alpha channel; run the KPT Gradient Designer plug-in on a duplicate of the channel to create a gradient fill in the type; use the channel to apply Lighting Effects to an imported background image; add a masked shadow.
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1a Setting the specifications for the Grid.
1b Type set on a transparent layer, before alignment with the Grid.
1c Setting up the magic wand to select everything but complete transparency.
1d Shift-dragging a selected letter with the move tool.
1e The letters of “H•O•M•E•R•S” after dragging to align them with the Grid.
2a The type loaded as a selection in channel #5.
2c The gradient was first run on the “O” (top) and then on the other letters, which were all the same size and weight.
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A key characteristic of chiseled type — like you see on the marble entrances of banks and public offices — is the sharp, “V”-shaped cross-section of the carved strokes of the letters. Whether you raise the lettering or cut it in, the key to creating chiseled type in Photoshop is the KPT Gradient Designer filter, which is part of Kai’s Power Tools, sold by MetaCreations.
 Using the KPT Gradient Designer filter in Circular Shapeburst mode with a black-to-white gradation gives you the raw material you need for using Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filter to create the smooth, raised center ridge and corners characteristic of raised chiseled lettering or the sharp-sided channel of recessed carving. The Circular Shapeburst even produces the gouge marks of the chisel. Added visual effects help to define the lettering as raised or cut in. (If your computer is short on memory, you can use the Emboss filter instead of Lighting Effects; see “Low-RAM Chiseling” at the end of this article.)
1 Setting and kerning type. Set type by choosing Photoshop’s type tool from the toolbox, clicking it where you want the type to begin, setting type specifications, then clicking in the bottom part of the Type Tool dialog box, typing the characters you want to set, and clicking OK. Or you can do as we did: Set type in Adobe Illustrator, convert it to outlines, fill with black, and drag and drop it into Photoshop.
Once the type had been imported, we decided to letterspace the word “HOMER’S” using Photoshop’s built-in Grid. To use the Grid, first turn on the rulers (Cmd-R on Mac; Ctrl-R in Windows) and drag the 0 point over to align with the middle of the first letter. We aligned it with the “H.”
Double-click on one of the rulers to open the Preferences dialog box (or choose File, Preferences, Units & Rulers), and for the Rulers, Units setting choose a convenient unit of measure; we chose Pixels. Before closing the Preferences dialog box, set up a grid for letterspacing as follows: Choose Guides & Grid from the pop-out menu in the upper left corner of the dialog box (or click the “Next” button) and choose a Color and Style for the grid. Then use the ruler to measure the distance from your 0 point to where you want the last letter to be. For us the distance was 1250 pixels, so we used that measurement for the “Guides Every” setting. We needed to spread five letters over that distance (“O,” “M,” “E,” “R,” and “S”; the “H” was already set at the 0 point and we would eliminate the apostrophe, substituting one of the bullets we would add). So we entered “5” for the Subdivisions setting. In the View menu, make sure Show Grid is turned on. Since we wanted to visually center the letters on the grid lines and wanted some leeway in positioning them, we turned off Snap To Grid.
To letterspace the type, you can use the following method outlined in “Kerning with the Magic Wand,” below. When you’ve finished moving letters, press Cmd-D (Mac) or Ctrl-D (Windows) to drop the floating selection.
Kerning with the Magic Wand
To move the individual letters, double-click the magic wand in the toolbox to choose it and open its Options palette. Set the Tolerance at 255. Now if you click the wand on a letter, it will be entirely selected, including its antialiased edges. Shift-clicking will select additional letters. By holding down the Cmd-D (Mac) or Ctrl-D (Windows) to turn the wand into the move tool, you can drag the letter sideways (or use the arrow keys to move it), and if you hold down the Shift key as well, movement will be constrained to horizontal so the letter will stay on its baseline
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Choosing the type tool again, we clicked it between the “H” and “O” and set a single bullet by typing Opt-8 (Mac) Atl-8 (Win). This character appeared on a layer of its own. We held down the Cmd-D (Mac) or Ctrl-D (Windows) and dragged the bullet into position. Then we made the other bullets we needed by clicking the bullet with the magic wand, holding down the Cmd and Opt keys (Command to turn the wand into the move tool and Option to duplicate the selected item; use Ctrl and Alt in Windows) and dragged a copy of the bullet between the “O” and “M,” holding down the Shift key as well to keep the copy aligned with the original. We used the same copying-and-moving method to make and position the other three bullets we needed. We pressed Cmd-E (for Merge Down; it’s Ctrl-E in Windows) to combine the bullet layer with the layer below, which held the type.
2 Making a channel for chiseling. Once you’ve set and spaced the type using the convenience of a transparent layer in step 1, you can store it permanently in an alpha channel this way: Open the Layers palette and Cmd-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) the type layer’s name to load its transparency mask as a selection. Then open the Channels palette and make an alpha channel by Opt-clicking the mask icon (Alt-clicking in Windows), second from the left at the bottom of the palette. Using the Opt key (Alt in Windows) lets you name the channel as you create it; we called ours “Graphic.” Don’t deselect.
With the selection still active, Opt-click the New Channel icon next to the trash can icon at the bottom of the Channels palette (Alt-click for Windows); we named our new channel “Gradient Filled.” You should now see a black-filled channel with the type loaded as a selection, as in figure 2a.
If your type varies in size, as ours did, you’ll need to apply the KPT Gradient Designer separately to the different sizes. To select only the “O” and its enclosed diamond, we chose the marquee tool (press “M” for marquee, or press “L” if you’d rather use the lasso) and held down the Opt key (Alt in Windows) as we dragged to surround all the other selected letters, thus subtracting them from the selection, and leaving only the “O” and its diamond selected.
With the KPT Gradient Designer installed, choose it from the Filter menu and choose Circular Shapeburst from the Mode pop-up menu. Position the cursor at the left end of the gradient band (below the curved bracket that extends across the middle of the Gradient Designer interface) and press and hold the mouse button. The cursor will turn into an eyedropper; a spectrum gradient band will appear, and above it a thinner black-to-white gradient; drag the eyedropper over to the white end of this thin gradient and release the mouse button. Then repeat this color-sampling procedure, but this time drag the eyedropper from the right end of the gradient to the left (black) end of the thin gradient band. When you finish, the interface should look pretty much like the one in figure 2b (below), with a shapeburst in the center box that’s white in the middle and black at the edges. (If it’s black in the center instead, pop out the menu from the gradient icon and switch from Sawtooth B->A to Sawtooth A->B, or vice versa, so your Gradient Designer setup matches figure 2b.) Click OK.
2b Setting up a gradient with the KPT Gradient Designer
If you have different-size letters, as we did, repeat the process of loading channel #4 as a selection in channel #5, deleting parts of the selection, and running the KPT Gradient Designer on the remaining letters (you can rerun the filter by pressing Cmd-F on Mac or Ctrl-F in Windows). We ran the Gradient Designer once more — on “DYSSEY,” since all these letters are the same weight. We decided to use a different treatment on “H•O•M•E•R•S,” as described in step 5.
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