100 Styles 15 - Lovely Lines - Water

Water effect (Click the image to see it bigger)

To finish off the week I've chosen to interpret the "lines" in yet another way, this time I'm thinking of the lines around the text in this water-like effect (though there is a stroke effect as well, so there's actually multiple meanings to it). Read on for info on how the effect was created and to be able to download the style file.
Water Text Effect

Blending Options (Click the image to see it bigger)

Here I've changed one thing, but it's an important thing. I've lowered the Fill Opacity, to make the text itself transparent, while the effects are opaque (or at least as opaque as their individual settings make them). The overall Opacity affects the entire layer (i.e. both the actual layer contents and any layer styles) while the Fill Opacity only affects the actual layer contents (i.e. pixels, text or path objects).

Outer Glow settings (Click the image to see it bigger)

Here there's a lot of action, first the color and the Blend Mode (Color Burn) makes the effect darken what's below, but in a more vibrant way than e.g. the Multiply Blend Mode. The Size of course control the extent of the effect, but it also controls the way it looks as the effect looks very different at large sizes where it goes around the entire text rather than go in-between individual letters in the nice way it does now. Finally there's the Contour, Contours aren't too easy to explain, but are pretty self-explanatory if you play around with them.

Bevel and Emboss settings (Click the image to see it bigger)

The structure part is fairly ordinary, Size and Soften are set to values that hit a good balance between the effect being barely noticeable and it being to harsh. In the shading things gets more interesting though. The colors are blue since it's a water effect, and that the highlight color is lighter and the shadow color is darker shouldn't be too surprising either. What really makes the difference though are the Highlight/Shadow Modes, set to Color Dodge and Color Burn respectively. Their benefit over the default Screen and Multiply is that they makes the highlights/shadows more vibrant. The Opacity is then lowered to make the effect more subtle.

Stroke settings (Click the image to see it bigger)

If you've read the above the rationale for the Blend Mode should be familiar, it's to make the stroke interact with the background in a vibrant way. Apart from that it should be fairly self-explanatory.

Note: The effect works best on a blue background, but since it is a water effect that shouldn't be much of a problem. It should be possible to make it work on a fair amount of other colors as well by changing the colors slightly, and perhaps the Blend Modes in some cases. Or scratch that, if you want a water effect you should use a blue background, but as long as you're just looking for a cool effect you can use it on any background.

--> Click here to download the style <--