It didn't work. I filled the white mask with black, turned off the layers and I get the shadow layer below. This is making me nuts

Molly,

Not the mask, the 'blur' and 'text' layers below the 'Ballons' layer. (BTW, I'm sure that when you said fill the mask with black, you meant only fill the selection on the mask with black).

You are doing it exactly right, as far as I can see. Good luck!

Cool, Geeze, I would be still doing this a week from now. Thank you BTW, You are allowed to post images now that you have your five posts.

Do you apply the Gaussian blur to the mask or the red layer? I tried it on both but the blue part didn't blur, just the red.

not exactly an easy tutorial

some interesting techniques !
i had to improvise on some steps, blurred the second highlight to get a better result

and im wondering if the highlights could be made in a better way, as they are a bit too random for my taste

heres my result

you dont want to make it blue, molly, you want it to be transparent

alpha select your path
shrink
activate Balloon layer
add layermask 'From Selection' and 'Invert'


and then you blur the layermask

The Gaussian blur is on the layer mask, to give the 'clear' look to the balloons.

I'm uploading the one I did. There is nothing original about it...just my attempt to follow this excellent tutorial.

you have the same problem as me, Jas45:

the N is not readable anymore (looks like a floating pillow ), same as my H

choosing the right font is essential for this tut....

Esper,

That's an interesting point. After your post, I went back to the 'text' layer and tried to reshape the 'N' (and 'S') with the eraser tool. But the hollow area in the top of the 'N' is only 13px wide in it's original form, and in the text we grow the selection by 20px. Needless to say, I still had the problem no matter how much I thinned the letter... we would need >40px of space to give the 'N' any definition.

Do you know of a workaround?

You have learned a lot Jas, in 4 months.
I have taken two steps back, I am afraid to say...my balloons were once red and now no more.
I don't know what happened. I think you are doing good!

no i dont know of a workaround

i didnt grow my selection by 20px - i used less, but i used a different font

tutorials work the way they are shown, if you choose different values, fonts, colors, words, etc
they may work, but you can never be sure
i guess thats the point where the art begins:
improvising and making it right

i dont think you have to necessarily grow the selection, if you already have a real bubbly font