Inner Shadow and Chromatic Abberation

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic Aberration is a stylistic effect that mimics the failure of a lens to properly focus all colors. You should at this point be able to use Shapery script's boolean operations to create this effect. However, there is a script called Chromatic Aberration by me that allows you to emulate this effect in your sign. It is available in Dependency Control so grab it from there. The script looks like this:

x Offset and y Offset allows you to increase the size of the effect. You can set one of these to 0 to limit effect in only one direction.

If you tick the checkbox Keep Original Color, the script will apply the effect but will not change the base color. If this is unticked, the base color will be whatever is the result of subtractive color mixing from the three colors in the right.

The three colors will allow user to change the colors of the effect. There is no need to change it most of the time since this is the default colors of chromatic aberration but if the user wants to change it, they can.

Convert text to shape can be enabled if you have are applying the effect to text but want to convert it to shape instead. Converting text to shape looks better in most cases since it would use clip otherwise.

Komi-san wa, Komyushou desu. Episode 6: 0:11:52

Let's take this sign.

The only odd thing that I did in the video above is setting x Offset and y Offset to negative. When you use the script, it will set a color is specific order but in this sign, they have been reversed. So using negative offset will reverse the colors. Here's comparison:

Positive OffsetNegative Offset

A couple of things about the script because I've seen people keep failing to use it.

1. Don't use it in a text with border. If a text has border, split it into layers (maybe by using Blur and Glow script) and then use this in the fill or you might get a fail like this:

   1. If you have to apply the effect to the border of the text, first convert the border of the text to shape or offset the fill outward using Shapery and then apply the effect to that shape.

Komi-san wa, Komyushou desu. Episode 5: 0:12:39

Here we have a slightly different effect. This proves that you cannot rely solely in the script must have the ability to improvise. The CA effect is in both the border and the fill and the effect is only in one direction. Here's the result:

1. I first duplicated the fill, converted it to shape and offsetted it outward to create the white border.
2. Then, I applied the script in the fill. As you can see above, it generates the CA colors in both upper left and lower right but the original sign only has the CA in lower right. So I took the lines that had upper left colors and united it with fill. So now we now have fill and lower right lines.
3. Now onto the border, I ran the script again with negative offset. Since the border only has the CA colors in left, I united the white border with CA colors of the right.
4. The result is as shown above. It took a lot of tinkering even after the script did a lot of heavy work.

Inner Shadow

We will get signs where we have depth in the text. So we will have to emulate this depth in the flat text. Again, given what I've taught you before, you should be able to use pathfinder options in Shapery to get this effect pretty easily. However, Shapery already provides an option to create inner shadow.

1. Go to Automation -> Shapery -> Utilities.
2. In the left dropdown, choose Inner Shadow.
3. Click on Shadow button.

As you can see above, the higher the value of shadow in the sign prior to using the script, the deeper the shadow will be.

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Episode 2: 00:00:08

Using Shapery, you should be able to do most of the signs that have inner shadow. For the sign above, you use perspective tool to align the text, add shadow to the text, use Shapery to apply inner shadow. Apply horizontal gradient to both the fill and the shadow separately. There is also the white highlight in the bottom.

TODO: Add example