It's a New Day

The colors are really nice in West Michigan today. The sky is blue and the sun is bright even though it is starting to make its trek southward known. Before we take off for the rest of the fay I wanted to get this poet up.

A few weeks back we did that trip to Portland Oregon. From that I had put together a slideshow in PhotoMagico which is an awesome slideshow program for he Mac. The opening two slide is this cool transition from a text block of Mt Hood to the full view of the mountain.

Here is how I got that effect of the text of Mt Hood. First I started out with an image if the mountain. The below image is one my wife took last year when the conditions were much more clear than they were this trip.

I added a very large text layer that would give a very good text definition. In this case I used Impact font at 103 points

From that layer I duplicate it and rasterize the layer so I can manipulate the pixels. I know Corey Barker, of Dave Cross probably have a means to do this using the smart object in PS but I did not have the time to investigate that option.

Once rasterized I used the marquee selection tool to select just the individual letter then did a transform (Command-T). from there you go into the warp mode and start to play with the lines, anchors, and handles until the top of the letter approximates the mountain. It is a back and forth kind of thing as moving one part effect the rest so you have to go and fix other parts of the warp until you have it the way you want.

Once the lettering is all the way you want it make the mountain layer active and command click on the newly rasterized and warped word layer thumbnail. This will make a selection of the word. As the mountain layer is the active layer hitting command-j will take the selection (marching ants) and put it on a new layer.

Adding a black background and saving it as a couple of different jpg's provides the basis for the slideshow transition. Below are three images that demonstrate the transition in stop action.

Hey, we are going to go out and look for some color so have a great weekend.

Doug