When I was trying to create a logo for my blog, I stumbled across this cool Photoshop tutorial. It produced the effect I was looking for, but being the coding geek that I am, I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to try out different colors, and possibly create a colorized header for each blog post. I needed automation!

I got to work and created a new WPF project, named “FontFx”, that utilizes the Photoshop API. It supports randomized colors and offsets, a variable number of color/cutout/blur layers, and creates a reflection for you. After the program has completed, the result is left open in Photoshop so that you can tweak the results.

Because I can foresee needing to automate other font effects in the future, I’ve made the solution generic enough to support multiple effects. Each tab in the program represents a single effect. Future effects can be dropped in by simply creating a new View and ViewModel.

Configuration screen

Result after automation

Final result (after manually erasing half of the reflection)