How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

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How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds with Photoshop

By Lord Thomas

A few months ago I was playing around on Photoshop and decided to make my own custom desktop

backgrounds with my name on them. The original design was OK, but then I figured I could quite

easily make something quite nice using gradients and few filters...

The first step is going to be to make the actual image. I did mine at 2000 by 1600 not because I own

any screens that size, but because I know that there is always a fairly good chance that the

background will comfortably fit on most monitors for the next few years.

Now you need to pick a nice set of primary and secondary colors. You don’t want them too light

(which they probably were in this example) because otherwise you won’t be able to read the text

later.

How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

2

Now you need to make the gradient from one side of the image to the other. You could experiment

with other types of gradient, however I found linear was the best.

How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

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Now you need to apply the twirl effect. I recommend an angle of about 75°, this seemed to create a

nice curve. More contrasting colors show up better using this.

It is quite difficult to see on my example, mainly because the two colors I picked weren’t very

contrasting.

How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

4

Now you need to insert the text. Originally I had done this in a vector program where I could get the

text exactly centered, however I discovered that you could do it in Photoshop by drawing a square

across the whole image, and then aligning the two with identical vertical and horizontal centers.

Because it bases it on the bigger object, the text is now centered. You can then delete the shape. If

anyone can think of an easier way to do this, please tell me! Whilst you don’t need your text to be

white, it makes it look better on the finished thing. I also like to take the transparency down to

somewhere between 70% and 90%, because it adds a nice effect, I think.

Now we need to apply the stain glass effect. The defaults are OK, but I like to make the cell size

bigger.

How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

5

And now we have our finished thing! You could stop here and export it to PNG, however there is one

more step I like to do.

How to make your own stained glass name backgrounds in Photoshop

Lord Thomas

6

If you duplicate the background layer a few times, you can use color variations to produce more

backgrounds. With your multiple backgrounds you are able to have a cycle of images, which is quite

cool if you use a modern operating system, like Windows 7, or just a really old version of OS X which

has supported it since the dawn of time (it was in there, six years ago).