Hi all,
I’m working on a bump map, but my Photoshop skills are quite minimal.
The map consists of several irregular gray shapes on a black background. Now I’d like to know an easy way to darken the edges of those shapes a little closer to black, keeping the center parts lighter.
Something like radial gradient wont work here out of the box, because of the irregular shapes, but if they were completely round, that would be the kind of tool that I need here. Any tips are greatly appreciated!
If those irregular shapes are on a layer of their own, you could try adding a Layer Effect and use the Inner Shadow setting.
Or the outer glow layer effect - just switch the blending mode to multiply and make it a dark grey/black. I sometimes use that myself, it’s a nifty little cheat.
Thanks!
It never even crossed my mind to try those! Both seem to work, in this particular case the outer glow seems to work really well.
I managed to get half decent results in the mean time by simply selecting the shapes (they are actually supposed to be stones), contracting the selections and burning the edges to make them darker. Then I repeated that for a few times leaving only the innermost area white. It worked ok, but was a rather tedious process as you can imagine.
This style trick will definitely be one to remember in a similar situation!
Yeah the whole feathering selections thing works, but the nice thing about layer effects is that they’re non-destructive, and can therefore be easily changed later on. Layer effects, while inherently kinda cheesy, actually have lots of weird little uses.
A more elaborate approach which might be interesting or inspiring…
Make a copy of the layer. Preserve transparency. Fill with white. Use layer effect Stroke. Inside outside, or center as suits your needs. Set that to black. Convert to smart object. Blur. Set mode to multiply or whatever.
You can change the blur since it’s a smart object. You can go in to the object and change the width of the outline.
If you prefer more destructive hands on messing about, you can take the earlier stroked layer and merge it down to flatten the effect (is there a better way, like a “rasterize effect” button?) then blur and copy that as need be.
Another way to get the outline is to ctrl-click the layer to select its outline, then use selection modify border.
If the circles are on a seperate layer, you can also put a layer above them, alt+click in between your new layer and your circles layer in the layer pallete, this will create a clipping mask that restricts painting on your new layer to not go outside the boundries of the pixels on the layer below it. This will make it easy if you wanted to do work on the edges by hand with a brush. Just take a lighter brush with a soft edge and shade your shapes by hand.
Thanks to everybody for sharing your tips!
These will come in handy in upcoming work! I find making these maps one of the most difficult and time consuming tasks in a modeling project, yet one that has a huge effect on the end result.
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