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Quite long - horizontal only - blurred shadow on text


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Hello,

 

I hope this is the right place to ask about production techniques that I'm trying to achieve but cannot get to the desired outcome: I'd like to get a very long horizontal only shadow (like a long motion blurred trail) on a text. I've tried shadows and all kinds of blur but either they don't support direction or they don't get to the length I'm trying to reach (around 200 ore more pixels). I also tried stacking multiple blurs but again I'm not happy with the results.

Any hint or suggestion on how to get this effect is welcome. Using Affinity Photo 1.9.1.

N.B. I know I can type values exceeding the sliders range but that doesn't seem to help much.

Thanks in advance!

 

 

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Hello, thanks for this but I think symbols are in Affinity Designer only (could be an option anyway since I also have it besides Photo).

I don't have examples to refer to, just wanted a blurred trail of a text following horizontal direction for hundreds of pixels in length...

- Mario

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Hi @Mabian,

Apologies for the delayed response here!

If possible, could you share a copy of the document that you have been testing with, or a screenshot of the results you have thus far?

I understand your current document isn't exactly what you want, but this may give us a good 'starting point' to offer some advice for you :)

Thanks in advance!

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Here is an idea, I'm combining the foreground, two sublayers with motion blur with large offset (250 and 500px), a shadow and a glow; it's getting closer to what I'm after but I'm still not happy about two things mainly:

1) The motion blur expands on both left and right side even though the direction specified is right (0°). I guess this is expected but I'm looking for a unidirectional blurred trail

2) I'd like the right trail more ... well... hazy :): now It's too long, I'd like something more ethereal, probably I could get away with a gradient alpha (left = maximum opacity, right = minimum opacity) but I have to understand how to get there..

So, any hint is appreciated.

Thanks,

    Mario

slice1.png

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Thanks for the image and further information provided! My sincerest apologies for the delayed response here as I have been 'out of office' for the past 10 days.

I have been playing around using the settings you've provided and I have created a document rather similar to yours, but using a slightly different method.

I created the text layer, then duplicated this and offset the duplicated layer by 200px. I then applied a Motion Blur filter to the duplicated text using 180° and 650px as the values for this filter layer. 

On 3/24/2021 at 10:43 PM, Mabian said:

1) The motion blur expands on both left and right side even though the direction specified is right (0°). I guess this is expected but I'm looking for a unidirectional blurred trail

That's correct, the Motion Blur works by blurring the text in both directions, however we can simply clip out the unwanted blur on the left hand side of the text using a rectangular clipping object.

After drawing a rectangle around the side of the image we wish to keep the blur visible, I applied this to the duplicated text layer as a clipped rectangle, which 'crops' the blur to only show in the rectangular area.

I then applied a Gaussian Blur to this layer also, using 25px as the value which resulted in the following -

image.png

On 3/24/2021 at 10:43 PM, Mabian said:

probably I could get away with a gradient alpha (left = maximum opacity, right = minimum opacity) but I have to understand how to get there..

You can achieve this using a mask layer with a gradient applied to it - where white equals 'visible' or 'unmasked' and black equals 'hidden' or 'masked':

I hope this helps! :)

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Hello, thanks it surely helps a lot.

A question about gradient...I would like to be proved wrong, but if I understand well you cannot edit a gradient once you created one because it's "printed", right?

This is one of the most annoying things in AF, I often change and fine-tune a lot of things and the non destructive approach of many filters and features in AF is awesome in this regard.

But for gradients (and perspective?) it doesn't seem the case.... (yet)?

Thanks again, will experiment with your suggestions.

- Mario

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4 minutes ago, Mabian said:

A question about gradient...I would like to be proved wrong, but if I understand well you cannot edit a gradient once you created one because it's "printed", right?

That's correct, once a gradient has been applied to a mask, you would need to re-apply a new gradient if you wish to change this in the future - as you've mentioned the gradient will be rasterised to the mask when applied, meaning it cannot be altered once created.

Our developers are aware that many users are awaiting this functionality and it's certainly something they'd like to add in a future update, however I cannot provide any timescale for this at this time  - my apologies.

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7 hours ago, Mabian said:

A question about gradient...I would like to be proved wrong, but if I understand well you cannot edit a gradient once you created one because it's "printed", right?

Wrong. ;)

There is a trick, but in combination with @Dan C's example you need to work around a display bug in the Layers panel:

  1. temporarily move the Blur layer outside, above of the text layer
  2. create a Fill layer (or a vector object if you need a defined size), apply a gradient fill with a transparent stop
  3. clip the Blur layer with the Fill layer in place of a mask
  4. adjust the gradient to your liking
  5. clip the text layer with the blur layer; the editable fill layer will disappear (the bug!) but it's not lost

To edit the gradient, move the blur layer outside the text layer again, the editable fill layer will reappear with the last gradient setting:

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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