10 years ago actually and have not been able to replicate it.

I used (I think) an almost transparent or white colour to make the text then colour to alpha'd it and put it on the background.
I made the sign for a place I was volunteering with at the time and they got lots of people to make this background.
Anyone got any ideas?

it looks like the picture-filled-text on top is the base text
seems it has a small bevel

the white cut out silhouette is an offset grown selection of the basetext

and there is a less grown grey textlayer underneath the basetext, plus a dropshadow

should not be too difficult to replicate

All I can say is Wow! it looks great
Sorry I'm not any help I can't play around in GIMP on Win8...and I'm way out of practice

Thanks for that explanation Esper. I'm afraid it is over my head though actually. I just used a preset to make the text. - I do remember that much. I didn't do anything much. I had just started using gimp.

Thanks Willy. Even though I cannot do much of significance I would be lost if I couldn't play with gimp.

do you still have that texture with the handprints, sallyanne ?

Can't find it just yet. Wasn't mine to keep. I haven't used it for anything else but I know where I might be able to find it.

if you can provide it, i will try to recreate the effect

Hi sallyanne,

I recognize that technique. You created text from a selection over the painted hands background. Then, you added a drop shadow and semi-flattened, which what gave you the white border around the text & shadow.

Here is my similar result, just a different font, and background.

quick attempt

Seems a lot happens in 10 years - people move on etc.
It doesn't matter what background you use.


I just haven't been able to do it with the text?!
Edit. That's it except I was able to have some of it clear so the background showed through! Thank you both.

what is semi-flattening ??

Willy with 8 you may restore the start menu and delete all apps (if you wish , i hate the apps on the PC i only like on smartphone , that can't support more powerful programs , and has touchscreen to handle them correctly )

I made a recent post about

The filter is located under Layer/Transparency/Semi-flatten. It flattens to the active background color.

Oregonian posted a good explanation of how it's used here.

It's normally used to dither indexed images and avoid the hard edges and aliasing associated with graphics interchange format files.

i see
not sure why you would use that for non-gif pictures

this white border doesnt make the pic look very clean
and if you wanted a good white border, a stroke would be probably much better, wouldnt it ?

Well, sallyanne asked what was used in the original composition and it looked as if semi-flatten had been used. To me, "better" is subjective and it just depends on what effect you're after but yes, I normally only use semi-flatten when my final result will be a GIF, displaying that on a background of the same color I used to semi-flatten, which gives me a nice anti-aliased shadow on the GIF, when displayed on the same background color.

Target format aside, the final result you get from semi-flattening depends on the amount of transparency you have adjacent to non-transparent or semi-transparent pixels. There are certainly plenty of methods to achieve anti-aliasing, which will give different results than is achieved by semi-flattening.

You're right, assuming your talking about the thin white worder. I didn't purposely put it there. The outline just stayed after getting rid of all the one colour (white) The other (fatter border, is from the drop shadow
I wonder if I would be able to stroke over the thinner?

yes i do, but as i asked before:
why do you use the semi-flatten ?
why not merge it down as usual ?

was it because the original picture is in gif-format ?

and also yes to trying the stroke
just save your alpha selected text as a path and then stroke it

I don't - I flatten or merge. Never heard of semi-flatten. I feel embarrassed because I have a good idea how the original was created but I cannot do it the same (I have no idea which gradient I used only that I was able to flush a lot of the colour out if indeed there was colour/white there.)
As said I was very early in learning Gimp so Glossy was an easy logo type for me to do.
I did one in glossy on a white background. merged it and then I selected all the white with colour tool select. Colour to alpha (white to transparent) then put the logo on top of a picture.
The original would most likely have been a jpg too.