Writing in sand

csmajik4 said:

I have a vacation picture that is on a beach. I want to make it look like there are some words or designs drawn into the beach.

There are several ways you could do this, I'm sure and I expect soon others will chime in with their methods. I think the approach would vary depending on whether you are wanting an aerial view of  writing on a beach (easier, less details)...or if it's a closeup of sand (harder to match sand look). The challenging part would be getting the look of the displaced/piled sand around the lettering.

1. Choose a font that looks like handwriting, make the color of the text 50% gray. Use Effects>3D Effects> Boss to make it look like the text is indented in the sand. Use Gaussian blur on it to reduce harshness, then reduce the opacity of the layer to about 60-80% and change merge mode to Texturize.
2. Create a brush that mimics the look of sand (I can help you with that next).
3. Mask the text and create a new blank layer so you are working above the original text layer. Expand the mask one or two pixels and feather it a few pixels (this is to keep a random look when you do the next step).
4. Use the Eye Dropper tool (E) to sample some sand color from your image, switch back to the Paint tool (P), and with the sand brush active, use Mask>Create>Brushstroke from Mask, choosing Outside. Do this several times varying between outside and inside the mask to get the look you want. You could also try using Emboss to highlight the effect of the displaced sand. Try various settings, merge modes and effects until you're happy with it!

--------------------

To Create a Sand brush:  Download my instructions for creating a glitter brush in Photo-Paint. The zip file contains an image and a text file with instructions. The idea is the same for creating a sand brush only I changed the settings to something like below. Play with the size and settings to match your sand. :)

Here's one I tried using a crop from a beach image of Anna Marie Island in Florida (the sand IS whitish). The displaced sand is a little too neat-looking, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it. You could go back and paint with the sand brush to make it look more random.

Patti

P.S. Warning: I probably averaged more crashes in PP when I was playing with this -- aaaarrrggghhh!