GIMP - Simple Floating Logo

GIMP - Simple Floating
Logo about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gimp.org%2Ftut...
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GIMP - Simple Floating Logo

by Pat David
12–15 minutes
Intention¶
This tutorial is intended to introduce you to a few simple

commands, and some concepts in order to create a logo that
appears to be floating above a background, like this:
The concepts are ones that you’ll likely come across multiple
times while working in graphics processing. Layer masks are
used to isolate a part of an image, thus allowing it to be placed
over a random background for instance. The addition of a drop-
shadow effect to make an object appear to be floating over the
background is another example.
Getting Started¶
Create a new image of appropriate size for your logo:
This will open the “Create a New Image” dialog, with options for
you to specify:
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GIMP - Simple Floating Logo about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gimp.org%2Ftut...
You can make this new image any dimensions you want, but for
this tutorial I am going to specify a Width of 256 px, and a
Height of 128 px. I haven’t specified any other options. When
you’re ready, hit “OK” to create the new image.
You’ll be presented with the new image on your canvas.

Chances are it will be a pure white image at this point (it may be
a different color depending on how your GIMP is setup to handle
new images - if it is, don’t worry).
Fill the New Image with Black¶
The first thing we are going to do is fill our new image with
black. The first step to doing so is to make sure that the
Foreground Color is appropriately set. Click on the foreground
color in the Color area to bring up the “Change Foreground
Color” dialog (if your foreground color is already black you don’t
have to do this step, but it can’t hurt to learn):
Click the foreground color to change.
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The “Change Foreground Color” dialog allows you to now set

the foreground color. We want to set the color to black RGB(0,
0, 0):
With the foreground color set, we can now use the Bucket Fill
Tool to fill in our image:
Activating the Bucket Fill tool.
Once the tool is activated, your cursor should appear as to the

left. To fill the layer you need only click on the image area at this
point. Your image should now fill with black.
Adding Some Text¶
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Now we want to add text to our image to create our logo with. To
see what we’re doing, though, will require us to change the
foreground color to something other than black (black text on
black background doesn’t show up so well).
Now, you can follow the above procedures again to set the
foreground color. If your background color is already white,
though, you can quickly swap foreground/background colors
using the arrows:
Swap Foreground/Background quickly.
You can also use they keyboard shortcut “X” to swap the colors.
With the foreground color set to white, we can now use the Text
Tool to add some text to our image:
Activating the Text Tool.
We can now draw a box on our canvas (image) to hold the text.
You can click on the canvas where you’d like the top-left corner
of your box to be, and drag the mouse down to the bottom right
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corner. You don’t have to worry about being exact at this point,
because you can adjust the boundaries of the box after the fact.
This is what you should see on your canvas after clicking and
dragging from the top-left to the bottom-right to define your
text box:
Defining the text box boundaries.
If you’d like to re-size the box for some reason, you can now
click and drag in any of the green areas shown below:
Resize handles to modify text box boundary.
Your text will go into the black box inside the green areas
shown above.
Once the text boundary box is sized appropriately, we can just

type some text. In my case, I’ll use my name:
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Text Tool Options (left), canvas view (right).
Chances are when you first start entering text, it will be very
small on your canvas. So let’s have a look at some options on
the Text Tool Options palette (left, above).
If you want to make your text appear bigger, you can change the
Size in the field shown. For instance, here I’ve chosen to set my
Size to 100px.
You may also not like the font that is chosen by default. In that
case, we can change the Font to something better by clicking
the icon. This will open a drop-down to scroll through all the
fonts that GIMP knows about on your system. You can see in
my example that I’ve changed the font to “Tw Cen MT Bold”.
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Creating a new layer from all visible layers.
Once we’ve gotten the text how we want it, we can now create a
new layer from all the visible layers so far (the text layer, and the
black background layer). On your Layers tab, right click on the
text layer we just made, and choose “New from Visible”.
Alternatively, you can also create a new layer from visible using
the menu:
At this point, our layer palette will have three layers on it, the
background, the text (“PAT”), and our new layer “Visible”:
Notice that there is a white border around the “Visible” layer.

This indicates that this layer is currently active, so that any
operations we perform will apply to this layer.
Which is good, because we are about to blur this new layer

a bit!
To apply a slight Gaussian blur to this layer, we simply invoke

the command through the menu:
This will invoke the Gaussian Blur dialog, where we can specify
how much blur we want to apply:
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The defaults were pretty good, but I wanted just a tad more blur,
so I increased the Blur Radius to 7. When you’re done, just hit
“OK”.
Adding Some Color¶
Now that we have our text done, it’s time to add a splash
of color!
We are going to add a new layer to our image first:
Or by Right-Clicking on the “Visible” layer in the layer palette,

and choosing “New Layer…” from the context menu:
New Layer using the Right-Click context menu.
The “Create a New Layer” dialog will appear - it doesn’t matter

what it gets filled with, so you can leave it at whatever Layer Fill
Type it’s set at (White by default I believe). Hit OK to create the
new layer.
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We are now going to fill this new layer with some color to add
some interest. To do this we will use the Plasma plugin:
I just left the default values and hit OK, but feel free to fiddle
with the values. Our layers now look like this:
Here is what my canvas looks like right now (with the plasma
layer on top and visible):
Bump Mapping¶
Now we’re going to use the text we created earlier to generate a

fake 3D shape on this plasma layer. The process is known as
“bump mapping”. I won’t get into the technical details of how this
works, as it is best seen rather than explained. Open the Bump
Map dialog through the menu:
The Bump Map dialog gives a good preview of what the

plugin does:
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To get it working correctly, this plugin requires that you properly

point to the source for the bump mapping. In our case the
source is the text layer we created earlier (the layer was named
“Visible”). So we’ll click on the spinner for the Bump map, and
choose our “Visible” layer from the list.
As before, feel free to play with the options. The only one that I
changed was the Depth to increase the illusion of depth (I finally
set the value to 6 in my example). Once it looks good, we’ll hit
the OK button to apply it to the layer.
Apply a Layer Mask¶
Now we are going to use a Layer Mask to isolate our bump

mapped text. First we need to add a Layer Mask to the
plasma layer:
Or Right-Click on the plasma layer and choose “Add Layer

Mask…” from the context menu:
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When the “Add a Mask to the Layer” dialog comes up, set the
Initialize Layer Mask to: White (full opacity).
Once you’ve added a mask to the plasma layer, your layers

should now look like this:
Remember, you can tell which layer (or mask) is active by

noticing which one has the white border around it. The layers
above show that the plasma layers mask is active (there is a
white border around the white mask, so it’s hard to notice, but
no other layer/mask has a white border.
We are going to copy the “Visible” layer, and paste it into the
layer mask for the plasma layer. So first, Left-Click on the
“Visible” layer in the layers palette to activate it:
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Remember, the white border will indicate the layer is active.
With the layer active, we want to now copy it:
Then we want to make the plasma layer mask active by Left-

Clicking on the mask:
Plasma layer mask now active again.
With the mask active again, we now want to paste the “Visible”
layer back into the image:
This will now insert a Floating Selection (Pasted Layer) into

your image:
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To get this Floating Selection into the mask, we need to

Anchor it:
This will Anchor the selection down onto the mask. Our image
and layers should now look something like this:
We may now want to add a different colored background to help

us fine-tune the results we have so far. Add a new layer to the
image as we did when creating the plasma layer, and place it
below the plasma layer. (You can click and drag layers to
change their order in the palette).
Pick an interesting background color and fill the new layer with
this color. The layers should now look like this:
It doesn’t look bad, but we can perhaps tighten up the results by

adjusting the mask a bit to clarify the edges of the text.
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Adjusting the Levels¶
I want to clean up the edges of the text with what we have so

far. Right now, the mask being used on the plasma layer is a
copy of the gaussian blurred text. To make it sharper, we are
going to adjust the levels on the mask for that layer.
To do this, we first make sure the layer mask is active by clicking

on it. Then we can open the Adjust Color Levels dialog
through the menu:
With the Adjust Color Levels dialog, we now want to sharpen

up the edges of the mask a little bit:
What we want to do is adjust the Gamma and White point

sliders. I started by dragging the White point slider down to
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increase the prominence of the plasma layer, then pushed the

Gamma up to emphasize it more. (If you’re following along, you
can also just copy my values from above).
The trick is to increase the definition of the edges of the text,

without going too far and causing it to look very jagged (aliased).
Play with the settings to see how they affect your results. Here
is what my plasma layer looks like after applying the above
levels to the mask:
Creating a Drop Shadow¶
Now we may want to get a little fancier and add an effect of a

drop shadow behind the logo to make it seem as if it’s floating
above the background. We’ve already created what we need to
generate this effect, we just need to move a couple of things
around to do so.
Make a copy of your “Visible” layer that had your original blurred
text on it. Select the layer first to activate it, then you can do:
Or Right-Click on the “Visible” layer, and choose “Duplicate

Layer”:
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This will create a new layer called “Visible copy”. Move this layer
above your background color layer to just beneath your plasma
layer as shown (you can Left-Click and drag the layer in
the palette):
Click and drag the “Visible copy” layer to beneath the plasma
layer
This layer will become our shadow, but we need to modify a

couple of things first. We’ll first invert the colors of the layer to
make the text black using:
Then we need to change the layer so that all of the white areas
will be transparent. This can be found in the menu:
The layer should now have black text over a transparent

background. We’ll now just want to shift this layer a bit to
simulate a height by offseting it down and to the right a bit. To do
this we can use the Move Tool:
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Activate the Move Tool.
If we hold down Shift and click on the canvas, we restrict the

Move Tool to modifying only the active layer (our shadow layer).
Drag the layer to the right and down a bit to simulate the
shadow. I ended up with this:
Shadow layer shifted to the right and down a bit.
At this point we can make it a bit more fancy by adding a

Gaussian Blur to the shadow to spread it out a little more. We
can also modify the layer Opacity, adjusting it to let the
background show through a bit as well.
Here is the final state of my image, where I applied a Gaussian

Blur with a 10px radius, and adjusted the shadow layer Opacity
down to 80:
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The End¶
Here is my final floating logo image when everything is done:
The neat thing about our process is that we can now use any
background we want behind the image, and the effects and
shadow will still be there:
Or we could save it as a PNG file with no background at all, thus

allowing whatever background there is to show through:
So that’s it! Go on and have fun making floating logos.
Errata¶
For those interested, I’ve made available the .xcf.bz2 file I used
to create this tutorial available to download here (96KB).
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The original tutorial this was adapted from can be found here.
GIMP Tutorial - GIMP Quickies (text & images) by Pat David
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
License.
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GIMP - Simple Floating

GIMP - Simple Floating Logo

This tutorial is intended to introduce you to a few simple

Create a new image of appropriate size for your logo:

You’ll be presented with the new image on your canvas.

Fill the New Image with Black¶

Click the foreground color to change.

The “Change Foreground Color” dialog allows you to now set

Activating the Bucket Fill tool.

Once the tool is activated, your cursor should appear as to the

Adding Some Text¶

Swap Foreground/Background quickly.

Activating the Text Tool.

Defining the text box boundaries.

Resize handles to modify text box boundary.

Once the text boundary box is sized appropriately, we can just

Text Tool Options (left), canvas view (right).

Creating a new layer from all visible layers.

Notice that there is a white border around the “Visible” layer.

Which is good, because we are about to blur this new layer

To apply a slight Gaussian blur to this layer, we simply invoke

Adding Some Color¶

We are going to add a new layer to our image first:

Or by Right-Clicking on the “Visible” layer in the layer palette,

New Layer using the Right-Click context menu.

The “Create a New Layer” dialog will appear - it doesn’t matter

Now we’re going to use the text we created earlier to generate a

The Bump Map dialog gives a good preview of what the

To get it working correctly, this plugin requires that you properly

Apply a Layer Mask¶

Now we are going to use a Layer Mask to isolate our bump

Or Right-Click on the plasma layer and choose “Add Layer

Once you’ve added a mask to the plasma layer, your layers

Remember, you can tell which layer (or mask) is active by

Remember, the white border will indicate the layer is active.

With the layer active, we want to now copy it:

Then we want to make the plasma layer mask active by Left-

Plasma layer mask now active again.

This will now insert a Floating Selection (Pasted Layer) into

To get this Floating Selection into the mask, we need to

We may now want to add a different colored background to help

It doesn’t look bad, but we can perhaps tighten up the results by

Adjusting the Levels¶

I want to clean up the edges of the text with what we have so

To do this, we first make sure the layer mask is active by clicking

With the Adjust Color Levels dialog, we now want to sharpen

What we want to do is adjust the Gamma and White point

increase the prominence of the plasma layer, then pushed the

The trick is to increase the definition of the edges of the text,

Creating a Drop Shadow¶

Now we may want to get a little fancier and add an effect of a

Or Right-Click on the “Visible” layer, and choose “Duplicate

This layer will become our shadow, but we need to modify a

The layer should now have black text over a transparent

Activate the Move Tool.

If we hold down Shift and click on the canvas, we restrict the

Shadow layer shifted to the right and down a bit.

At this point we can make it a bit more fancy by adding a

Here is the final state of my image, where I applied a Gaussian