Step 6: If you plan on using this text effect for a wallpaper effect, header or other application that requires you to have a significant portion of the background in view, this is a great little tweak to add. We’re basically going to add a very subtle highlight to the background so the text appears to be every-so-slightly back-lit. Start off by selecting a fill color from your palette that is a brighter version of your current background color. You can see here I chose a brighter shade of blue:

Now select your Polygon Tool by pressing V:

Draw yourself a shape in the approximate shape you would like for your light source… I’m going to use this particular shape because I want the light to expand outwards towards the top of the image:

Once you have a shape you like, apply some MAJOR Gaussian blur to it. I went with a pixel radius of 45 on this one:

Now go ahead and drag that object to the bottom of the object list on your docker.

At this point, the highlight is a bit too bright and overpowering, so we’ll tone down it’s opacity to a very low setting to keep things nice and subtle. Right-click the highlight object and click properties to adjust the opacity.

It’s subtle now, but the blue seems a bit too blue and I would prefer a whiter tone to it so it appears more like a light source. For this tutorial, I simply popped open the Brightness/Contrast/Intensity tool and pumped up the brightness to get a whiter tone:

The highlight is a bit too high, so let’s move that down a bit into a better position closer to the text:

And finally, we want to only have the text to have the backlit effect, not the reflection, so use the Interactive Object Transparency Tool to remove any slight bits of the highlight area from the reflection.

Take a deep breath… we’re done! Crop and add any other elements you want and you’re all set! here’s our completed project:

And here is an example of the text with a very subtle shine added to the text object:

If you don’t know how to create that shine part, check out this page of my Glass Text tutorial that shows you how to create a shine effect step by step.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and we’ll see you in the next lesson!

Dan