Old Galaxy

The celebration of 10 years of Gimp marks passing from old to new times. Thus, we can show elements from the both. A common "old" theme involves "Gothic" lettering on aged paper.

We will need a good font. A quick Google search yields found a wonderful page of mr. Dieter Steffmann. Too bad, it's in German -- if you don't speak that language it would be better to proceed straight to His download section.

As most blackletter fonts are hard to read for modern people, we want a font that is not too old. The name "Moderne Fraktur" sounds just right -- and indeed, after reviewing several other fonts it appears that our first try was the best:

Now, we can fire up The Gimp, starting with an empty 300x250 image. Let's mark a 50-pixel high strip on the bottom, as a message area for the Gimp loader; with an extra pixel for the border, let's create a guider on y=199. Click on the upper ruler area and drag a line down until the status bar shows "Add Guide: 199".

By using the text tool, we write down the lettering:

Let's keep each of the text layers, we'll use them later.

Now, we'll add a faint shadow. It's nearly always a good idea to add one to any large-size text.
Duplicate all three text layers, and move the copies to the top. "Merge down" them into a single layer, "blur" once and move the layer by 4,4 pixels to the down and right. Set the layer opacity to 25%.

It's time to make the image "aged". Just insert it into a thick magazine and throw into a bonfire... oh, wait, wrong tutorial. Use Script_Fu|Decor|Coffee Stain (moving away any stains placed in the message area), and then do Script_Fu|Decor|Old photo. Copy&paste the result back into our image.
As it's hard to decide between Mottle and non-Mottle, let's do both of them and then set the opacity of the upper one to 50%. Don't merge the two new layers yet, though.

The left stain is too intense, let's go back and turn down its opacity:

My initial design was to have the image fluently go from old-themed version on the left to modern-themed on the right. So, let's create a new layer, fill it with the "starfield" gradient, add a layer mask and put a black-to-white gradient on the mask...

Whoops! Accidentally, I failed to notice that I had a "shape" set to something other than "linear". But, the result is quite nifty. I decided to put my initial design aside for now and investigate what we can get with strange gradients.

You can play with different shapes, they yield interesting results. Let's continue with "spiral (cw)":

Let's apply gaussian blur to the layer mask, and move on to the text. Let's grab our old text layers and move them to the top. They fit nicely atop their defocused copies, however, they look better if you change their color to white but cut down the opacity to 50%:

Now, let's pull up a copy of the non-mottled "old photo" layer. Let's create a helper invisible layer that is all black except for the message area which is white -- the guide will help you make a rectangular selection which then can be filled with white color. The old photo layer can have a layer mask added -- let's copy our helper layer onto the mask:

As you can see, the edge of the stain is too articulated. Let's get the sepia color ("O" then a click on a flat area) and touch the stain up by painting it with paintbrush with low opacity.

To add a visible border between the message area and the image proper, bump map the sepia layer using the helper layer as a mask. The result can be blurred a bit to make the border softer. Finally, let's set the sepia layer's opacity to 80% or so:

Time for some retouching. I decided that the text isn't marked enough -- adding another shadow, black, displaced by 1,1, unblurred, at 50% opacity fixed this issue.

Also, a bit of light effects on the stars layer made them more alive.

End result:

about the tutorial

This image was part of the 10th Anniversary of the first release of GIMP.

back