Not many people know that FlexiSign has the power to use photoshop plugins, the people who have heard about it think it is to complicated to attempt. This article will give you a step by step and show you just how easy it can be.

What you need to make this work
1. A copy of FlexiSign Pro v7.5 or better. Previous versions of FlexiSign do support this functionality, but does not work quite as well.
2. A copy of PhotoShop.
3. Optional additional Photoshop plugins.


The first step is to open up your copy of FlexiSign.

Once open select the Bitmap menu and check the Bitmap Edit Toolbar. You are going to need this extra toolbar later in this tutorial.




Select your Text tool




Type in some text


Select your pointer tool and click on the text you just typed.



Go to the Bitmap menu and select Rasterize



In the Rasterize menu make sure Create Mask is checked, Keep original is un-checked. Resolution and Color mode can be set at your choice. Be careful with Resolution as extremely large files can cause flexi to sometimes crash.




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Excellent tutorial Barry!
It's a similar workflow to Signlab, (and most other sign apps, I would think).

I usually add another step to the process...

Before rasterizing the original, make a duplicate and add an outline to that around 1mm (1/16th inch or so)
Then rasterize that and apply the plugin filter effect.
Then overlay the original on top and select mask/clipping/whatever it's called.

This then clips back the edge of the bitmap - (which is where you get the most obvious stairstepping), and leaves you with a sharp vector-like edge.

Another advantage of this is that you can use a much lower resoultion for the raster, because you won't see the rough edge. The low resoultion is not as apparent within the blend effects.

Glad you liked the tutorial Neil and thanks for the addition tip, I will give that a try.

On a similar note, the Alien Skin plug-ins can also be used with CorelDraw/Corel PhotoPaint. I've noticed some issues if trying to use them directly within CorelDraw, so using them from within PhotoPaint seems to yield the best results.

I thought you can retype text and still have the filter attached. Is this possible? I remember at the world sign show flexi did this. Please help.

I do not believe you can re-type the text as part of the images is actually a Bitmap.

When doing the cutout tool with text how do you get the white box to disappear after your done. If you don't understand what I mean I am sorry. But I have eye candy in flexi and I can get the cut out effect with text but then it leaves a white box around after finished. Is there anyway to delete that.
Thanks Karen

If you have flexi 7.6 you are supose to be able to take the magic wand and select the white area and hit delete of something like that. I still use 7.5 and this is not an option for me.
Ken

The box should be gone once you re-mask the object.

How do you get the new plug-ins in to Flexi, I have Flexi Pro 7.5v5 and do not see the plug-ins I have added to photoshop 7 there?