You can paste you grid into photoshop using one of several options. For this pick "pixels"

Title: The Interest Grid

Order of Operations:


Part I: Laying the Virtual Foundation

  • Open Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
  • In Illustrator, create a new Rectangular Grid by clicking and holding down on the Line tool on the tools palette. This will bring up a sub-menu which will allow you to select the Rectangular Grid tool.
  • In the dialog box, enter the following settings.
    •             Width: 640px
    •             Height: 480px
    •             Horizontal Dividers: 7
    •             Vertical Dividers: 14
  • Increase the stroke of the grid to 3 pts. Then, color the grid stroke (not the fill) white.
  • Select the grid and copy it.

Part II: Paste grid into photoshop

  • After you are done copying it, switch over to Photoshop, and create a new document that is 640 pixels (width) by 480 pixels (height).
  • Paste the grid into the document. There should be a dialogue box that is displayed.
  • Change the color mode from CMYK to RGB
  • Paste the grid into Photoshop. Hit the "return" key to set the image.
  • Use a gradient fill to fill the background. Use darker colors (black to blue for example), so your white grid shows up.
  • Edit / Transform / Perspective - stretch your grid as shown below.

Part III: Setting the Text

  • Using the text tool, type your name in a thick, bold font. Use all capitals and color it white.
  • Right click on the text layer and choose "raterize"
  • Edit>Transform>free distort and change the type to it follows the perspective of the grid

Part IV: The Tiling Process

  • Use the path tool to create a path as shown below
  • Click on the path tab (you may need to find the path window which is under the window menu)
  • In the path window, right click on the path or pull down the flyout menu and go to "create selection"

  • .With the selection now active (you can see "marching ants"), you can use the command edit>paste into
  • edit>transform>scale - will let you resize the image within the shape
  • repeat several times to create a grid with your interests.
 

Use varying degrees of opacity to finish your collage

 

Part V: Super Snazzy Text Effect

For the text effects you will use various settings in the layer styles. To get to layer styles, click on the "f" button on the bottom of the layers pallette.

Stroke this text. By adding a Layer Style, I selected stroke and applied the following settings.

            Size: 4

            Fill type: Gradient

            Angle: 96

            Scale: 81

Create a three point gradient fill, using dark blue both ends with white dead center. Here is how the stroke should appear.

Now add outer glow using these settings

  •  Blend Mode: Screen
  •  Technique: Softer
  •  Spread: 15
  •  Size: 51
  • Color (R 25, G 25, B 147)

Add a drop shadow using these settings

  • Opacity: 33     
  • Angle: 90
  • Distance: 36

To give our text that truly super-cool incandescent look we need to duplicate this layer, making sure that it is located beneath the original text layer, and then turn off the Style effects of  Drop Shadow, and Stroke

Reposition the text, in the workspace, so it rests about half an inch below the original text.

Apply the filter effect of Radial Blur (Filter / Blur / Radial Blur), repositioning the Blur Center to the very bottom, dead center. Set the Blur Method to Zoom and set the amount to 71.

In the Outer Glow dialogue box (Layer Style), change the color to red, using these numbers: R 147, G 25, B 25.

            Blend Mode: Hue

Opacity: 100   

Spread: 18

            Size: 79

Select Color Overlay in the Layer Style palette and leave the default red selection on. No adjustments need to be made here.

 

This is nice, but it's not quite done yet. Although the colors are bright and vibrant, you can easily overpower every other graphic element in the mix. So, a slight transparency adjustment needs to be made. For our final touch to this image, we will knock this glow layer's transparency level down to around 60%

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