This effect gives text that appears to be made out of flame. To dothis technique, you will first need to download the texture called realfire.jpg. The texture is actually 480 x 480 pixels. A reduced version is shown below.To get the real file, click on the fire texture and download it from thenew window that pops up.
Open a new file, 250 pixels wide by 150 high, 16 million colors,with a white background. Select Black as your foreground color and addsome text. Use a font with some flow to it. Some fonts look better if youuse italics. Here I've used a font called Invitation, 72 point Bold.Afteryou've added your text, go to the Selections menu and choose Promote toLayer.
Next choose the retouching tool (the little pointing finger.) Inthe Controls palette set it to Smudge, and under Brush Tip set the shapeto Round, the Size to 13, the opacity to 50, the Hardness to 0, the Densityto 100, and the Step to 1. Use the Smudge tool to make little flames bypulling up. Be sure to roughen all the edges. When you're done, it shouldlook something like this:
Now we add the flames. Open up realfire.jpg in PSP and in the Editmenu, select Copy. Now return to your project and in the Edit menu, selectPaste: As a New Selection. This should fill your entire window, but don'tworry. Using the Move tool, adjust the flames so that the part youlike best is directly over your text. Now go to the Selections menu, andagain choose Promote to Layer.
Next, to get the effect we want, go into the Layers menu and chooseLayer Properties. Set the Blend Mode of your new layer to Lighten. Yourtext should appear filled with your flame. At this point you might wantto save your graphic as a PSP file, which preserves the layers. This isalso a very convenient place to change the background color to best matchyour page. This can be done by simply changing the color of the BackgroundLayer
Now we want to sharpen it up a bit and prepare to save as a transparentGIF. First go to the Layers menu and choose Merge:Merge All. Then go toImage,Sharpen: Sharpen more.
To finish, set your background color to white, and then go to theColor menu and select Set Pallette Transparency. Set the PalletteTransparency to the Current Backgrond Color, and then save your file asa transparent GIF.
There is one very interesting variation that you might want to try.When you adjust the Blend mode of your fire layer, try setting it to Hardlight. This embeds your text in a wall of flame.
