Embossing in Wood

The example we've chosen is a dingbat, but the effect works equally well using text.

We've also chosen to apply this to a wood background, but any background will do, preferably a less "busy" background, and fairly light in tone, but experiment.

Step 1:

1. Load up your background image
2. Set the foreground colour to mid grey (80,80,80)
3. With the text tool, add your dingbat or text (This is from the Almanac dingbats)
4. Promote the floating section to a new layer
5. You may need to reselect the dingbat
6. Finally, set the dingbat layer to "overlay" mode

   In overlay mode, mid-grey can be considered neutral, it has no effect on the image below, but lighter tones apply the equivalent of Screen mode, darker tones are the applied in Multiply mode.

   The rest of our examples all rely on varying the light/dark edges of our dingbat to effect the background layer below.

Step 2:

1. Here we apply a "chisel" effect to the dingbat, here we are using the Almathera bevel plugin, but other bevels or chisels will generate a similar result.
2. Note, that the chisel effect cuts into the background as its name suggests.

Step 3:

1. Using the same base, we now apply an emboss effect (again from Almathera).
2. This time the image stands out from the background.

Step 4:

1. Sticking with our embossed dingbat, we apply a heavy gaussian blur.

   Now you can see the edges of the dingbat have been rounded off, making it appear to bulge from the background.

Variations

1. In our first example, we have taken the result of Step 4 above, cut it out and applied a drop shadow to make a tasteful standalone wooden button. Select your appropriate backround to achieve other button effects.
2. In the second we have changed to text, and buttonised the whole of the upper layer, which in turn has created a button effect in the background, this means....

   You only have to change the background to create an entirely new image.