For the Copies step of the tutorial, I changed my settings. I changed the width of the selection from 20 to 18 because I started with a smaller canvas (I'm used to making smaller tags for another forum with a tag width limit of 500 pixels), so I changed the width of the bar slats to be more in proportion to my smaller canvas size. After filling the 18 pixel wide first bar slat, I moved it to the left (instead of leaving it centered on the canvas). I changed the number of copies to 11 (instead of using 10 from the tutorial), because I wanted the bar slats to fill the space of the canvas all the way to the far right of the canvas. I believe I changed the Shift X setting also so that the slats were closer together.
I duplicated my tube layer and offset it so that it would appear in the bar slats area. I deleted all the tube except for the portion that appears inside the slats, changed the blend mode to burn, and reduced the opacity.
I did all of my drop shadows differently than the tutorial. For the tube "drop shadow", I:
- duplicated the tube layer,
- moved this layer down in the layer palette below the tube layer,
- offset the duplicate layer to the right and lower using effects/image effects/offset (horizontal: 3, vertical: -1),
- applied a gaussian blur of 2,
- changed the blend mode to Difference, and
- reduced the opacity.
I've never done a "drop shadow" quite like this before but I was quite pleased with the drop shadow effect that it created for this image. I think the color blends nicely and doesn't have that dirty appearance that I get so often using the normal drop shadow filter. I did a similar effect for the drop shadow on the slats. For the "drop shadow" on the text, I duplicated the text layer, moved the duplicate below the text layer, offset it (H:1, V:-1), then changed the blend mode to Burn.
I added a horizontal bar, for placing my text, and I filled it with the same gradient that I used for the background (I changed the angle to 90). I added a contrasting outline around all the slats and the bar, changed the blend mode to Screen and reduced the opacity.
For my frame, I filled it with a medium color, applied an inner bevel (bevel=2, width=1, smoothness=10, depth=10, ambience=-53, shininess=22, color=white, angle=315, intensity=75, elevation=50), contracted the selection by 3, then deleted the selection. I liked the sort of button appearance that it gives to the tag.
For the Constellation step of the tutorial, I couldn't get my filter to set the star size as indicated. The lowest I could get my Star Size to set is 2.00. As much as I tried, I couldn't get the effect as mentioned in the tutorial, so I had to play with the settings. I applied the filter to the inside of the slats as it is in the tutorial, but it didn't look good to me as I had the larger size stars and they were covering too much of the tube inside the slats. So that's when I tried using the VM Natural Sparkle filter. You can see my tag above to see the filter applied within the slats. If you're interested in the settings for the Sparkle filter, I used the default settings and only changed the Max Size and Random Seed for three frames of animation (19/119, 18/118, 21/121). For the animation, I changed the display time to 15.
But I wasn't completely satisfied with the Sparkle as I really wanted to use the Constellation filter. So I decided to apply the filter to the outlines of the slats (rather than the inside of the slats). I'll share the settings that I used for the Constellation filter in case you like the effect (2, 100, 1, 1, 100, 10, angle=45, make selection transparent).
The fonts I used are
Emily Regular for the name and Century Gothic (size 7) for the image credit. For the image credit, I used a medium blue color and then changed the blend mode to Difference.