Create an engraved line effect in The Gimp

In this tutorial I will show you very quickly how to produce an engraved line like this:

It has many uses, personally I use it in a lot of my websites as you can see from the header of Help Developer.

1. Firstly, create a new canvas and fill it with a darkish colour and create a new transparent layer on top, select this new layer.
2. Now grab the select tool (Ctrl and R) and select a region x pixels width and 1 pixel high and fill it with black.
3. Do the same exactly one pixel under the line you just created however, this time use white to fill it, which will produce this effect:
   
4. No change the layer opacity to 10.0 on the Layers window, which will produce this:
   
5. That is the main effect, we will now go on to create the merging in with the colour like in the Help Developer header, but for most things this is as far as you need to go.
6. Go to the Layers window and select the bottom layer and use the colour picker (shortcut: O) to set the foreground colour the same as the colour on the canvas.
7. Now select the Gradient tool (shortcut: L) and go to the Gradient options, change the gradient option to FG to Transparent
8. Go to the top layer (the one with the 2 lines) and go to the Layers menu and select Autocrop Layer.
9. Now with the gradient tool click and drag from the left of the line to just over half way making sure that the line you produce with the tool is straight. The outcome should look something like this:
   
10. Thats it, you now have a great looking engraved effect. You can download the .xcf file here