Layer styles, part 2
In the previous post (which was much too long ago considering this was supposed to be a regular series of posts…) we built a simple graphical layer style which added a plain black border to a text layer generated in FCP.
To expand upon that technique, let’s turn the black border into a drop shadow by blurring and offsetting the text’s outline:
The 2D Transform node allows you to move and resize an image. The parameter values are relative to the image size — e.g. to move the image 10% to the left, you’d enter a value of -0.1 for “X translation”; to stretch the image to twice its original height, you’d enter a value of 2 for “Y scaling”, and so on.
For a tiny bit of extra interest, the originally white text was tinted to yellow using a Multiply node on the left-hand side of this tree. As in the previous version, the Over node at the end composites the original text (left-hand side nodes) over the drop shadow (right-hand side nodes).
The subtitle layer now looks like this:
