Expert: Ran - 3/23/2009

Question
How would I go about producing the effect of back-lit text?  Is there a tutorial with respect to doing something of that sort?

Answer
You need to create an additional copy of your text underneath. The top copy wants a thin outline of your backlight colour, for example, yellow, the second with a thick outline of your background colour, for example, white. Then you need to set up a blend of about 20 steps between the two.

Set your Duplicate Offset to 0,0 if you haven't already. It's in the options box at Ctrl+J/Document/General.

In the below example I was using the font Arial Black at 20pt:
• Set the outline of your text to your background colour, 3mm. Be sure to select rounded corners in the outline box.
• Press Ctrl+D to create a duplicate. You won't see anything happen of course, but a second one has been created on top of the original. Set the outline to yellow, 0.1mm, rounded corners, behind fill.

Select both text objects with a marquee. Open the Blend docker with Arrange/Blend. Select 20 steps then Apply. What do you think!

I tried 100 steps and even my 3GHz quad-core Xeon had to think for a moment!

It can be hard to select the rearmost object to change its settings. I couldn't do it with Alt-click. I recommend selecting both with a marquee, then Shift-click the front object to deselect it.

If your text has an outline already which you want to keep, take a third copy and place it on the top of the blend pair, with the outline of your choice.

This is a far cry from some of the photorealistic layer options in Photoshop but if you need to use them, create your object in Photoshop then pull it into CorelDraw (after flattening of course). By the way, you need to be working at 300dpi in Photoshop for your image to be the same size when imported into CorelDraw.