Re: Matalic finish

by jdowdell(at)macromedia.com (John Dowdell)

 Date:  Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:52:55 -0700
 To:  <hwg-graphics(at)hwg.org>
  todo: View Thread, Original
At 8:05 AM 4/6/0, Garland Hendrickson wrote:
> I am using Coral Draw and I have Fireworks.  I need to create
> a shiny gold like appearance on a graphic that I am creating.
> Any ideas on how I would go about doing this.

Two of the things that help to suggest a shiny metallic surface are the way
it reflects light, and suggestion of environment through reflection. There
are various ways to achieve both, and the "live" editable vectors can help
greatly here. Quick notes:

--  Look at gradients, particularly those which cycle through light and
darker gold colors. Quick tip: Set identical gold colors as your
foreground/background colors, then create a new "satin" gradient fill. Open
the Gradient Editor, and click on the color bar in a few spots to add color
chips. Now lighten or darken a few of these chips very slightly. (You can
affect just luminosity through the system-level color picker.)
    It often takes a bit of tweaking -- I particularly like to drag the
gradient handles very wide, with the Paintbucket tool -- but you can make
convincing metallic surfaces through this method alone.

--  To suggest the environment, you might consider cloning the shape and
filling it with a different black/white gradient. In the Object Inspector,
set a blend mode of "screen" and lower the opacity. Particularly when this
overlay gradient has a different gradient center and angle, this can really
help suggest that there are other objects around the surface which the
metal is reflecting.

--  You can certainly use pixel-based filters too. Fireworks 3 ships with
demos of all the EyeCandy filters, and some of these are fully-functioning.
The nice thing about applying pixel filters in Fireworks is that everything
remains editable: you can always use a filter as a LiveEffect and go back
and change it later. It's not frozen to pixels.
   (I'm betting Adobe will try to copy this in a future version of
Photoshop... it's extremely useful in daily work.)


Summary: Metallic surfaces are definitely achievable, particularly with
gradients, but can take a little playing with to get the appearance you
desire.


Linda Rathgerber offers a tutorial on metallic effects in Fireworks:
http://www.playingwithfire.com/buttons.html

There are also many tips and Fireworks extensions at Kleanthis's site:
http://www.projectfireworks.com/

jd








John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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