Now that we've got a pretty decent chrome looking effect,
let's go back to the main render comp and start adding in a background.
I'm just going to start by making a new solid layer.
New, Solid layer.
I'll just name this BG for background.
Make sure it's the comp size and click "OK" and drag that to the bottom of the layers.
Then I'll just add a ramp effect,
a gradient ramp to that layer.
I'm going to fit this to my window up to 100 percent.
That way, I can see the whole layer.
Then I'm going to change the start and end colors.
The start color, let's make it a lighter purple somewhere in here.
The end color, I'm going to do a deep blue,
maybe with a little bit of green in it, something like that.
Then bring that up a little,
maybe bring the purple down a little.
That purple is probably a little too bright.
You get a little more red. Something like that.
Click "OK". Then I want to make it a little more interesting than just a linear gradient.
I'm going to add an adjustment layer just above it;
Layer, New, Adjustment Layer.
I'll call this BG Brightness and add a curves effect to it.
Curves in the Effects and Presets, drag that out.
Now I can just click and drag to add a point and make this a little brighter.
But I don't want to affect this entirely as a whole.
I want to just mask off a section of
that background gradient to make a portion of
it brighter and just add some variants to it.
I'm going to just click and hold on my rectangle tool to get to my Ellipse Tool,
and then click and drag to make an ellipse mask on this adjustment layer.
Then I'll hold the space bar to move this around until it's about where I want it.
Let go of the space bar and let go of my mouse.
Now that adjustment layer is isolated to that mask,
I want to make it a lot softer.
I'm gonna go into my Mask Controls, into Mask Feather,
and really crank this up somewhere in the 400s probably.
Now I have this bright spot that I can
manipulate using this mask and the curves layer itself.
If I just click and drag this point around,
maybe increase the contrast just a little bit.
That might even affect the saturation of the underlying colors.
Just make it a little more interesting.
Let me grab these handles just to make it a little less perfect,
just so it doesn't look so computer-generated.
Fit this to the window one more time and take a look.
I think that purple on that background is still little too bright,
so I'm going to bring that down.
I don't want the background to be too distracting and maybe increase
the saturation of that blue a little bit,
and make it a little bit more purple.
I've got the start of a background there.
Next, let's add a vignette around the corner so they get a little bit darker.
I'm going to add another adjustment layer.
Layer, New, Adjustment Layer.
Leave this at the top and rename it Vignette.
Add another curves effect.
This time, I'm going to darken it,
but I'm going to also add a mask to it.
This time with that Ellipse Mask Tool,
I'm going to click in the center, drag,
hold down Control while also holding Shift,
so that I make a perfect circle,
scaling from the center and move it out to the basically outer edges of my comp.
Then I need to go to my mask itself and change it from add to subtract,
and then again into the Mask Feather,
and increase that to a much higher number somewhere in 400s again.
Now I just have this nice vignette that might be a little too extreme,
but we can always modify that later.
That's looking pretty good.
Now let's make the whole thing glow a little bit.
Let's add another adjustment layer.
Layer, New, Adjustment Layer.
We'll just add a simple glow effect.
Nothing fancy. Just bring that out.
I'll probably bring that below the vignette
because I want that to affect everything in the comp.
I'll just increase the radius a lot so that we've
got this nice glow coming from the text.
We could adjust the threshold,
don't want that to be showing up in the background there.
Maybe just keep it in that sweet spot right around 50 percent.
The intensity might be a little bit too much.
I'm going to drag that back to somewhere around 0.5 or
0.6 and that's going to give us this nice halo around the text.
Maybe I'll increase the softness a little more.
I'll rename this Effects.
This is the start of a cool look,
but now we have an actual background to work with and see
the actual chrome text in the context of the environment a little bit more.
We're going to take this a lot further in a later lesson,
but this is a great starting point.
I'm just going to lock up these layers right here so I don't accidentally adjust them.
We can move on to the next lesson.