Wow, this is bril­liant. I’ve been doing things like this with fonts for ages but this is the best tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion I’ve seen on how to repro­duce this effect. Mine is usu­ally more random exper­i­men­ta­tion to create a sim­i­lar effect.

Excel­lent.

very cool….

Thanks for shar­ing the tech­nique Yves. I par­tic­u­larly like “$3,000 worth of com­puter equip­ment to emu­late the look of a $3 rubber stamp”!

For some time I had been telling people to use ana­logue tech­niques like smeared paint, scratched out toner, and crum­pled laser­prints (‘scrunch­ing’) and then to scan the results at 300dpi or better. This was in pref­er­ence to the tech­nique Adobe called ‘Cre­at­ing a rustic or eroded effect’ on type (p.76 ‘Design Essen­tials’ Adobe Press 1992) using Pho­to­Shop 2.0’s dif­fuse filter. I guess insist­ing on the idea that Pho­to­shop should never be used for set­ting type — even dis­play type — is just old dogma now.

Yves, you have shown us another reason to be open about work­ing out­side our com­fort zones and remain­ing open to pos­si­bil­i­ties.

This is a fine tech­nique to enhance cre­ativ­ity and pro­duc­tion. Great arti­cle. Thanks.

Mabuhay, Yves!

In a serendip­i­ti­tious run of luck, I came across your tip while I was wrack­ing my brains in search of a Pho­to­Shop tech­nique of “aging” fonts. Because of you, I now have a book cover about a man­u­script writ­ten by a Fil­ipino some 200 years ago — with the appro­pri­ate effects on the title text.

Thanks.

Glad it was help­ful, Dan. If you get a chance, please post or send us a snap­shot of your cover.

Great tuto­r­ial… any thoughts or tips on how this might work with a t-shirt design?

Thanks, this was per­fect and easy! I’m sure it will be my new favorite! On some things, the HIGH PASS didn’t work well, so I sub­sti­tuted with ‘render clouds’ to achieve the grayscale vari­a­tion. I love the final result! :)

Inter­est­ing. Never thought of going about it that way. I use this effect rel­a­tively often, but resort to scan­ning in pho­to­copied black pages, play­ing with the levels for some grainy high con­trast, and then screen­ing the result on top of the type.

I think I’d still prefer my method, as it’s more organic, but I can defi­nately see use for this method should lack of time or pho­to­copiers and scan­ners present itself.

> On some things, the HIGH PASS didn’t work well, so I sub­sti­tuted with ‘render clouds’ to achieve the grayscale vari­a­tion.

What I didn’t tell was that I devel­oped this little trick some 10 years ago, when you still needed a sig­nif­i­cant mass of water drops sus­pended in the sky to “Render Clouds”. ;^)

Con­sider this as a start­ing point and improve on the tech­nique — I will def­i­nitely try out your vari­a­tion. The main advan­tage of the High Pass filter is that it erodes more the inside of the shapes, which is very sim­i­lar to what hap­pens with stamped let­ters in real life .

In answer to Stephen Coles’ query above, check out these plugin fil­ters for PS:

http://​www.​mrretro.​com/​m​a​c​h​i​n​e​_​w​a​s​h​_​f​i​l​t​e​r​s​_​t​h​r​e​e​.html

They look like a good buy, if you don’t mind the fact that some­one else’s hard work makes your designs look good!

This is fas­ci­nat­ing, espe­cially Cameron Moll’s “Wicked worn look.” I have been seeing a lot of this type of treat­ment, espe­cially in New Amer­i­cana Music design…it seems to be a code for Rough Authen­tic­ity.

I still print things out and mash them about on a photocopier…but I will cer­tainly give this tech­nique a try!

i had to book­mark this one. thnx yves!

I like the com­ment about the $3000 worth of com­puter equip­ment to make the work of a $3 rubber stamp…

Looks great, best part is, is it doesn’t look fake.

Wow that is very impres­sive! I am a rub­ber­stam­per and my daugh­ter often tries to make stamp­ing and scrap­book­ing effects in her com­puter. Im going to for­ward this on!

Good tips. Fun to take the end result into Illus­tra­tor and play with live­trace. Right on!

very cool, very use­full.

Hey! Another use for the High­pass filter. I was doing lots of alpha chan­nel stuff to do that part of the prepa­ra­tions. Thanks for that!

Hey
Great tut with great effect
Only thing I can’t figure out how you say it’s trans­par­ent?
When I start i have the text and white bg on one layer
how do you get the white to be trans­par­ent at the end?
Please help.

A 1 bit TIFF is trans­par­ent and can be coloured in Adobe InDe­sign and Illus­tra­tor, and QuarkX­Press. But really, we pro­duce these tuto­ri­als, yet it’s up to you to know the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the soft­ware you use. We are no help desk, ;)

!SKILLS! thanks for impart­ing the wisdom. much appre­ci­ated.

Thanks Yves, very cool effect!

thank you for this!!
all other rubber stamp tutes are com­pletely rub­bish.

Peter, it looks like some­thing has gotten gar­bled in this tute. There is a pice of a sen­tence (& Con­trast brings out the tex­ture” />) just hang­ing onto the graphic that is just above the para­graph that begins, “Thresh­old the image…”

Can you rec­tify this for us? Is it part of an instruc­tion needed to com­plete this tute, or is it extrain­ious matter?

Thank you for all your grat tutes.

I am sorry but I am not very much impressed with the final result. I have seen some other tuto­ri­als for “Stamped Look” and they were OK but this one doesn’t look much like a “Stamp”.

I obvi­ously can’t please every­one, but for­tu­nately you have those other tuto­ri­als as a point of ref­er­ence. Good for you. :)

This is a great tuto­r­ial, but it is really so much easier to make using Xara Xtreme. Just the text tool, rec­tan­gle tool and a frac­tal plasma trans­parency with a pro­file of -0.48 and -1. The advan­tage is it is a vector. You can also export it as a .png file with alpha to pre­serve the trans­parency.