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Antique Text Technique Guide[GIMP]

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Antique Text Technique Guide[GIMP]

Postby Seamus76 on Tue Mar 12, 2013 11:06 am

I'm a big fan of antique style maps, and on my latest one, Alaska(http://goo.gl/ckMFE), I used a simple technique on the text to make it look a little more "antique". At least that was the effect I was going for. I use GIMP, but I think most of this can easily be done in PS as well. Any questions just let me know.

Some things I used:
Colors:
I usually don't use pure black as I find it too "new", instead for just about everything including outlines/borders, routes, text, and just general usage I go with HTML color 3f3f3f. Which is just a really dark, dark gray I would say.
The other color I used for this map is HTML color f5f5f0. I'll use this later so sit tight.

Again, this is what I did for Alaska(http://goo.gl/ckMFE), so you can try this and then play around with the basics.

1. Wrote my text using color 3f3f3f
2. Duplicated that text layer
3. With the "duplicate" layer active I went to Colors/Map/Color Exchange
4. Make sure the From Color is the color you used to write the text. So for me the From Color was 3f3f3f
5. For the To Color I used f5f5f0, but again you can play with these colors and see what you come up with
6. Once the colors are set, hit OK
7. With the "duplicate" layer active I changed the Overlay mode to Difference and lowered the Opacity to 45.1 (this is just a number that looked right for me, but change the opacity as you see best)
8. Still on the duplicate layer, I went to Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur and applied a 1px g-blur.

And there you go. The text should look kind of antique'ish. Usually the issues I ran into were because the From Color was black, or something else other than the color I used, so make sure those colors are the ones you want and used or it won't work right.
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