3 Creative Text Effects That Build Versatile Photoshop Skills - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Introduction to 3 Photoshop Text Effects: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this skill share class. I'm making three very interesting and very different text effects in Adobe Photoshop. I've chosen these text effects because each of them uses a very different set of important Photoshop skills. Using them for text is just an introduction. Once you see how they work, there'll be skills to add to your Photoshop toolkit ready for you to use them in all sorts of Photoshop projects in the future. I'll teach each of these effects step by step so that you can follow along. And your project is to create one or more of these and post your work in the class project section. Really hope you'll enjoy this class as much as I've enjoyed putting it together for you. 2. Color Inverse Text Effect: The first of our text effects is this sort of reverse or inverse color text effect. Everything here is fully editable. To start, I'm going to create a brand new file, so click on New File. Mine's 1920 by 1080. Yours can be any size that you like. We want to display the layers palette so press Function key seven or go to Window and Layers. We're going to add a new layer. Click the plus sign down here. We've got black as our foreground color. We're going to the rectangle tool, and we're going to set these three options to pixels. That's really important. And then just drag a rectangle over the bottom half of the document, and that's going to fill automatically with this black color. We're going to make this a smart object. So if it's selected, go to filter and then convert for smart filters and click Okay. And then to make these into waves, we're going to filter and distort and then wave. Now, with the wave filter, you just want to get something that looks like this, and that is a sine wave. I'm using number of generators one because I just want it to look really simple like this. The wave length is a distance between the waves so that you can make more or less depending on your wave length. You want these wavelength values here to be pretty much the same. If you drag one, you probably drag both. The amplitude is the size of the wave, and so you just want to set that to a value that makes sense to you. I'm thinking a fairly small value will work for me. I think I want my wave length to be a little bit bigger. So once you've got something that you like, just click Okay. Now, this is fully editable by clicking on the wave option here, you can change these settings. I think this is better for me. I'm going to add my text now, so I'm going to the type tool. I'm using a font called anagram NF, and I know that it needs to be about 48 pixels. You can experiment with what makes sense to you for your document. Now, counterintuitively, you want to be typing in white type, so you want to make sure that this little box up here is white. Otherwise, it's not going to work. Going to click down here and put my type in here just simply because it's going to be easier to see over the top of the black. And so I'm just going to click and then type my type. The font has stuck. The type size has not, so let me just make that 48. Now I can position my type where I want it to be. And as you can see, the white is being lost in the background, but the white that's covering the black is highly visible. To make the inverse text effect with this type layer selected, we're going to choose one of two blend modes. Doesn't matter which one you use. It could be difference or exclusion. They're going to have the exact same effect. So now this effect can be altered in the sense that you can, as you've seen, edit your wave structure, but you can also move this type object around, and you could change the type, the typeface, the font size, the words, anything you like. And finally, to add the color effect, we're going to click on the type layer and make sure that we have different colors here. So I'm just going to click this icon. So I've got black and white. It's going to make things a bit easier to see. Go to layer New Adjustment layer. We're going down here to gradient map. Gradient map is a way of applying colors to a document based on what is in the document. If I just reverse this particular gradient, you'll see that the colors are reversed because this color here white is being applied to what was previously black, and this color here is being applied to what was previously white. Well, we want something a bit different. So let's click on the gradient, and I'm going to set my stops here. I want this stop to be blue. Doesn't really matter as you've seen which stop is sich because it's very easy to change them around. Click on this one and make it yellow. I'm going to click Okay. And then if I want to, I can click the undo reverse, so I can reverse the gradient should I wish to do so I I've got the colors the wrong way around. Now, this effect is fully editable. The waves are editable. The text is editable, the gradient map is editable. Everything can be changed. 3. Blend Text Into a Photo: This next text effect is pretty simple. It's a lot of fun to do. And what it involves is hiding this text behind some of the elements in the image. In this case, we're hiding the text behind the trees. We're going to start by opening our image, and I've had one open recently, so I'm just going to grab this one here. I'm going to add my types. I'm going to the type tool here. Going to click in the document. I'm working with White type up here. And the font that I'm using is called MelgataRgular. Got it set to 400 points not going to be big enough right now. So let's just click in here and I'm typing my text. Now, the images that I'm using for this particular effect are all from unsplash.com, and I'm going to give you links to download those. So I'm just placing my text roughly where I want it to be in the document. This is a fully editable effect, so we can move it later on. Going to Window and then LAS because I do want to have my AS panel visible. I'm going to click on my typea I'm going down here to the FX icon. I'll click on that, and I'm going for blending options. The blending option that we're using is called Blend If. You can see up here Styles blending options is selected, and we're using Blend If. And what it allows us to do is to tell Photoshop that if the underlying layer is darker than the current layer, we want to start hiding it. So what are we going to do just drag this slider over. And as you can see, as I drag it over, we're starting to chew into this text here. Now, I can split this little slide here by holding down the lk key on a PC option on a mac, and I just want to split that into two because that's going to make the transition area a little bit smoother. And all I'm looking for is a setting here that is hiding the parts of this font here that are in the trees, basically. Once I get what I want, I'm just going to click Okay. And now, if we move the type around, you'll see that it actually disappears into the trees. Again, this is fully editable. So I don't like this capital letter T here, so I'm just going to grab it and make it a lowercase I think that looks a whole lot better. But the font can be changed, the type can be changed, the font size can be changed. Position of the font can be changed. And, of course, you can re edit that blend if by just clicking on this icon here, you'll see that this has got a funny little icon. When you double click on that, you're actually going to open up this layer styles area again, and you could tweak that setting. Now, there is a caveat with this effect is that it won't always work perfectly. So let's have a look at a couple of examples, and I'll just tell you why I made the choice of those images and how I'm going to work with them. This is the first of the images. What I chose here was an image that had some dark area and the foreground and some light area in the background. That's ideal for this situation. If I was using this, I would probably crop the image. I think there's too much, but this is fully editable, so I could take the text elsewhere, but you can see here that the sky is starting to eat into the type. So you just want to be really careful in terms of your image that you choose, and a good contrast between the foreground and the background really helps. We're seeing also a little bit of fracturing in the type. Don't mind it, but if you did, then you might want to be more careful about the image you chose. And then this one, desert Sunset, is working pretty well. Again, I would probably crop this image. I like this sort of area in the middle better than I like the edge areas. I think it's going to work a bit better that way. So when you're looking for images to download on unsplash.com, look for this really sharp contrast between the background and the foreground giving you something that you can sort of hang your hat on to get that blend of process to work for you. 4. Create Interest With Layer Styles: For this text effect, we're going to create it using a series of styles. So I'm going to start with a brand new file, 1920 by ten, 80. For me, yours can be any size that you like. I'm going to fill my background with just a color that I can work with. I'm going to the Text tool. Let's just go to the Layers panel. I'm going to add a new layer here and I'm going to type my text. I'm going to use the font Blackjack, and I'm going to make the font size 110, which I know works for this particular document. To get this effect, we're going to use styles. So with the text layer selected, I'm going to the FX icon. And I'm going to click down here on pattern overlay. Now, I've already located the old patterns that were shipped with Photoshop. What I did was I went to Window and then patterns, and over here in the flyout menu, I chose legacy patterns and more. That allowed me to get back to the legacy patterns that were shipped with earlier versions of Photoshop. And the pattern that I'm using is one from Artis surfaces. So you should find a group called Artis surfaces if you want to use this pattern, and this is it. You can scale the pattern in the dialogue here, so you can see that we can make it whatever scale we like. I'm going to keep fairly close to its original size. I don't want to enlarge it too much because it does lose a little bit of sharpness. It's blended in normal mode. Now to get the pink color for our text, we're going to use a color overlay. So let's just go and add a new color overlay. And I'm going to choose a color to use. I'm going to choose something fairly rich in color. And you'll see here that the pattern has disappeared. That's just fine. I want to come back to this color again later, so I'm just going to add it to the swatches. That's pretty important because it's really difficult to find it otherwise. So I'm just going to click Okay. Now, if we change the blend mode here, we'll be able to see the pattern underneath. So you could do something like choose multiply or soft light. So you can choose whichever blend mode speaks to you. There are a whole lot of them, and they all have differing effects. Screen is another one. I'm actually going to use screen. Now, to make a line around this type, we're going to add a stroke that is of this color, and this is the color we just saved into the Swatches panel. So let me just go and display the Swatches panel with window and then swatches. And this is the color down here. So we're going to add a stroke. Now, this stroke is going to be very small. You can say it's just one pixel. I'm going to click on color, but you'll see here that there's no way of actually selecting a color that is in the Swatches panel. None of these dialog options offer you up the Swatches panel, but because I've got it visible over here, I can just sample it. So that was why it was important to save it. Also to have it visible. So I'm just going to click Okay. So a one pixel stroke. I'm going to put it on the outside so I don't lose any weight in my text. I could make it a bit larger if I wanted to. I'm going to add another stroke. This time, it's going to be white. So I'm going again to add a stroke. Let's make it a white color. Again, I'm going to put it on the outside, so it's outside of everything, and I'm going to increase the size. All of this is adjustable later on if it doesn't suit us. Now, there is a problem with this particular stroke in that it's over the top of the existing pink stroke. So let's go and get the pink stroke and just move it up on. You can see that we're stacking these a little bit better. Let's go and add another stroke. So this one's going to be the same pink color. So let's go and select that pink color again, making sure that that swatches panel is still visible so we get access to that color. And this one is going to be, again, on the outside, and we want it to be bigger than the white one. A little bit difficult to see it right now until we actually move it down. So let's just go and do that. Let's move it down behind everything. So we've got the very small pink stroke up the top and then a white stroke here, and then this outline pink stroke. And you could come in and vary these if they weren't the right dimensions for and finally, our drop shadow. So we're going to add a drop shadow. Now, our drop shadow, I'd like it to come from this direction, so I'm going to change the angle on it. It's very hard to see right now because it's behind our text. So let's just increase the distance, and there it's starting to appear. But you'll notice a slight problem in the drop shadow is the shape of the original letters, so it doesn't look very good right now. I'm going to start working on increasing the spread and increasing the size. The size is pretty much fluffiness, so that's actually going to give us a bit better of a drop shadow effect. Distance is going to lift the text off the page a little bit. We may want to work with the spread. So between all of these settings, you can find an ideal value for your drop shadow. The blend mode is multiply. We're using a gray or black here, and you could also adjust down the opacity if you want to. Now, one of the things about this effect is that because it was created using styles, we can actually save it. So let's go back into the effects dialogue by just double clicking on the word effects here in the Las panel, and let's call this a new style. I'm just going to call this pink borders and just click Okay. And now in the future, if we create a brand new document and add some type to it, can go to the Styles panel with Window and then styles. And the very last style in this panel is going to be the one I just created the pink border style. And it's simply a matter of clicking on the style, and it will be applied automatically to your type.