Worn Type: Smart Effects In Photoshop

1. Trailer: Hi, guys, I'm Jamie Bartlett. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to add imperfections to your typography, giving your fonts a more hand-drawn feel. I'll show you three different styles that will round up corners, roughen edges, and add some variations to your letters. Once you learn these techniques, you can customize, combine, and even make up additional textures of your own. All three effects are non-destructive. So you can update your artwork and the texture will automatically update with it. Once it's built, you can easily apply it to other projects in the future. Best of all, it's all done right inside a Photoshop, no other resources needed. The class is super simple, and easy to follow along, even if you're new to Photoshop. If you do need any help along the way, I'm here to answer any questions. To the class project, you'll be applying one of these textures to your own typography. It's as simple as that. Let's get started. I can't wait to see what you guys create. 2. Style #1: We're going to start with the easiest effect first. All we're doing is simply warping the texts edges a little bit to make them not so perfect. It's super simple to do, but adds a really nice touch to your thoughts. First we need to set up our document. You can make your document any ratio you want, mine is 16 by nine. But the important thing is to make sure that your long edge is 3,000 pixels. When you make a new document, make sure your longest edge is set to 3,000 pixels. Also make sure that its RGB. Once you have that set up, you can put in your text, I've already laid mine out here. Now the first thing we need to do is make our type a smart object. I have my type on two different layers. That's because anyway, I put on a curve. The simplest thing to do is select both of those layers, right-click on it, and say convert to smart object. That will put both of those layers into one smart object. Next, we need to go inside that smart object. Go to your layers palette, and double-click on the icon. That brings up a new document with the original text still preserved in here. Even if we wanted to later on we decide to change the font, we could do that right in here. Now, we need to make sure that our font is black. If you're using a font, you can easily just go in and change the color of the font here to black. Or if you're using some hand lettering or some other type of artwork, all you need to do is double-click on the layer and add a color overlay and make it black. I don't need the color overlay on mine, so I'm just going to uncheck that, but we do need to add an inner glow. I'll move the windows so you can see what's going on. I'm going to add an inner glow here, I'm going to make sure that my blend mode is set to normal and my opacity is all the way up to 100. Make sure that the color is white, and that the source is set to edge. For my choke, I don't need it nearly this much. I'm going to turn it down to, let's say two. The size, I'm going to set to five. Let's zoom in and you can see that the added just a little bit of a white feathered outlined to the edges. Make sure that the contour is set to this half round, and everything else should be okay. Now, depending on the size and thickness of your font, you might need to play with the size and the choke a little bit and adjust those to get a look similar to mine. But this is the range and look that you're going for. Once you have that set, click Okay. Now, that only applied those effects to the layer that I clicked on. I still need to apply it to my Anyway layer. To do that, all you need to do is right-click on that layer, go down to Copy layer style, then right-click on the layer to apply it to it and say Paste layer style. Now, we have that all set up in here. Now, the most important thing when dealing with smart objects is always remember to save. When you save your smart object, it updates it in your original document. Once you have that saved, you can close your smart object and it's updated in here. Now we need to set up our blend if settings so that this white disappears from our artwork. To do that, double-click on your layer. Now we'll open up our Layer Styles Panel. Down here you can see our blend if and we need to blend the white end. If you move the white arrow, our white start to disappear. But as you can see, it's still choppy. We want to soften it up a little bit. I'll move this back to about here, and we need to split this arrow. To split it, hold option on your keyboard and click on the left side of the arrow and that splits it. That starts to soften it up more, and we can still see some white. Let's bring that down right about there until we can't see it anymore. Once you have that setup, how you like it, click Okay. Now we need to set the color of our artwork. If you remember, my font was originally white in my design. Now is the time to set the colors you want. To do that, we need to group our layer by pressing command G on the keyboard, and then we're going to set a color fill layer for this group. Go down to this icon, click on Solid color. I'm going to change mine to white. But my color fill is inside my group. We want to make sure we pull that color fill outside of the group. Then we're going to set it to a clipping mask by holding option on the keyboard until we get this little arrow by hovering in-between the color fill and the group and clicking and it now is only applied to that group. Now just so you know why we made the group instead of just applying the color fill straight to the layer, is because if we did that, then that blend if setting that we just did would be affecting the color fill. That white arrow that we slid all the way to the left, it would get rid of all my text because my text is now white. We have to do that onto the group instead of onto the layer. Now we can add the distortion effect to make these edges a little less perfect and a little more hand-on looking. We'll go back down to our text layer, and we'll go up to Filter and go Filter gallery, and we only need one effect. So if you happen to have more than one, just delete it. The effect we're going to do is called glass. So find glass. I'm going to turn my distortion up to about seven. Then the smoothness needs to go all the way up to 15. Make sure your texture is set to frosted and scaling can go up to about 182. Remember, these are numbers that you can play with based on the size and thickness of your text. This is what works for what I'm doing right now. Once you have it looking how you want it, you can click Okay. Let's see what that looks like. That looks pretty good as about the right distortion that I want. You can always increase that or decrease that if it's a little too much, but I like where we're going with this one. As you can see, if we zoom in, the edges here are pretty rough. You don't notice it as much when it's all the way zoomed out, but they're pretty pixely looking. We're going to add a layer style to our group. To make sure your group is selected, double-click on it. We're going to add an outer glow. Let's change our blend mode to normal. We'll turn the opacity all the way up to 100. Make sure your color is white, make sure it spread all the way down to zero. Let's see, we'll play with the size and we'll just do one pixel just to give it a slight blur. You can see this is after and before. It just gives a slight blur to those edges so they're not so rough. Click Okay. That's all it takes to add a little bit of imperfection to your text. This effect could also be applied to any symbols or graphics that you have with that go along with your text. You just do the exact same process. That's it for this effect. Let's move onto the next one. 3. Style #2: This is going to be a very similar process. Same as last time, make sure the long end of your document is set to 3,000 pixels wide and the color mode is set to RGB. I already have my text in here, so we need to select all the layers of my text, right-click on it, and convert it to a smart object. Then just like before, we need to go into our smart object, and again make your texts black by either changing the color of your type face or if you're using artwork, make a color overlay and set that to black. Now double-click on one of your layers to open up the layer styles, and we're going to do an Inner Glow, and again Normal. Opacity 100, make sure that's white and the source's on the edge. We'll turn the choke all the way down to zero and the size to two. Make sure the contour is set to half round again and everything else should be default. Click "Okay" and zoom out, and now we can apply this. We'll just copy that effect and select the remaining layers, right-click, go all the way down to Paste Layer Style. Make sure that's saved and go on to your PSD, and the next step is the same as before, we need to go in and play with that Blend If setting to get rid of the white. Double-click on your layer, go down to the Blend If, split that just like before, grab that left part of the arrow, bring it to the left, and then bring this one down a little bit too, till you get it about as soft as you want, right about there. Click "Okay". Now we'll color it by grouping our layer and then adding a color fill to that group. I'm going to change mine to white, then pull it outside of the group, and then set a clipping max by holding Option, clicking between those two layers and now it's applied to my text. Now we're going to add some effects to our smart object. The first effect we're going to do is called median. Go up to Filter, Noise and Median, and this is going to round our edges. You can see that G right here has already started to get round. I'm going to turn mine all the way up to seven, and this median is again going to depend on the size and the thickness of your font, so try to get your font looking something like this. My goal here is to start making these corners pretty round. Like this A, it looks like the middle of the A is starting to bleed together a little bit. Once you get the look you want, click "Okay", and then we're going to go to the filter gallery. Before you go into the filter gallery, you need to make sure your foreground color is set to black and your background color is set to white, because some of the filter gallery effects are based on these colors, so that step is really important. Go up to Filter, Filter Gallery and we're going to start with Ink Outlines. I know I want mine to be set to 13, 48, and 24. Next we're going to add stamp. Go down here to add a new effect layer and we're going to change that one to stamp, and make sure the stamp is on top of the ink outlines because the order does matter. I know I want mine to be set to 25 and 16. What I'm doing here as you can see that these little white areas is just looking like the letters have been chipped away a little bit and they're a little distorted. The whole sides and edges of the letters are not nearly as wobbly and wiggly as the effect before. Most of them are still pretty straight, there's just areas that have been chipped away. Get that to look how you want and you can always go back, and adjust some things. One thing to adjust will probably be the stroke length. It'll give you some different looks. As you can see, the N right here completely disappeared, so that's probably a little too much unless that's the look you're going for. Then if you go back to Stamp, the smoothness is something that we'll adjust that a lot too. Play around till you get them out you want and then click "Okay". That looks great for the big text, but if we zoom out, you can see that our small text has completely disappeared. There's just too much distortion and we lose most of it. Now what we need to do is start adjusting things based on the small text, so we need to put the small text and the big text on their own layer and their own smart object. The easiest way I found to do this is to duplicate our smart object. Since the colors are the same, we can just leave it inside of the same group. We're going to right-click on our layer and we're not going to say Duplicate Layer, we're going to say New Smart Object via Copy. That way if we change anything in the smart object, it doesn't update the other one because if we just said duplicate layer, then the smart objects would be the same, and you wouldn't be able to adjust one without changing the other. Now we have two unique smart objects so we need to go into one, and we're going to delete the small text out of this one, and just have the big text, save that and we're done with this, so close it, and then let's go into the other one, and delete the big text. Let's now have everything on their own smart object. Close our smart object and now we need to adjust our filters for this effect. If you turn the median on and off, you can see how it's affecting it, so we really need to turn that down. Let's turn it down to two for now. Let's zoom in and see what that looks like. That looks like it's pretty good. Let's start with two pixels, click "Okay" and then we're still losing a lot of some of the letters, so we're going to go into the Filter Gallery and adjust those effects. Let's turn the smoothness down, right about 10, we'll try that. I'm going into Ink Outlines. Let's turn the stroke length down a little bit, that helped a lot. I think that looks good. Let's hit "Okay" and see how we like it. Zoom out. There's a little bit chipped away on some of these letters, but it's still readable, and that's how you make that effect. This is before and after. Let's move on to our last effect. 4. Style #3: All right guys, you know the drill. Three thousand pixels on the long edge, make sure it's RGB and let's get started. Let's select all of our text, just like before. I'm going to leave the credit out because it's way too thin, so I'm just going to select all my lettering for my quote, "Right-click", and Convert to Smart Object. Once we have that done, let's go into our smart object and change it all to black. Just so you know, the reason we're changing it all to black and so that the blend if setting works properly. We need pure white and pure black. When you have a bunch of layers like this, and you can save some time by just grouping them and by pressing "Command G" on your keyboard and then adding all the layer styles to your group instead of each layer individually. So we'll "Double-click" on our group and we're going to add an inner glow, same as before. We want the blend mode to be normal, 100% opacity, the color white, the source set to edge, and let's zoom in so we can see how these letters are affecting it, and we're going to set the choke to two, and the size we'll keep it at one. Make sure the contour is set to half round, and then let's put the range back to 50, which is the default. Again, this is just adding a very thin outline so that the filter gallery has something to work with. Let's click "Okay", we'll save it, and close our smart object, and then we'll set the Blend If. So "Double-click" on our layer and let's get rid of that white. So we'll go ahead and split this arrow by holding "Option" and dragging in the left side down pretty far, and then we'll bring the right side down. That looks good for now, we can come back and adjust it if we want to. We'll click "Okay" and then let's color it by grouping or layer, that's "Command G", and then going down, adding a solid color. I'm going to make mine white again, and then we always need to make sure to bring that outside of the group. Then hold "Option" and click between the two layers to get your clipping mask, and now we're ready for the filter gallery. Let's select our layer in the layers palette, go up to Filter, to Filter Gallery. Let's start with just one effect, so I'm going to delete that stamp and then I'm going to change the ink outlines to be green. I'm going to change my intensity to 73, contrast to 88, and then the green type to soft. So it's really hard to see right now but we want it to look something like that, and then we're going to add another layer of effects. So let's click the new effect layer, and we're going to change this one to torn edges. I know I want mine to be a 49, nine, and 20. So try to adjust yours depending on the size and thickness of your font to look something similar to this. You can play around with all of these values to get the kind of gritty, torn edge looking effect that you like. Once you're happy, press "Okay", and you can see how that's eating away at the edges of our text. One thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to go back in and adjust those Blend If settings just to see how it affects my text. If I bring this down even more, the edges get a little more gritty, and that's more the look I'm going for. Once you have how you like it, click "Okay". Let's zoom out. I'm pretty happy with the way those edges look, and that's all there is to this simple effect. 5. Bonus Texture: In this bonus video, I'm going to show you how to add a texture to the inside of your text, which you can apply to any of the effects that we just built. What we're going to do is we're going to add another Filter Gallery onto this layer. We're going to go to Filter, Filter Gallery. We only need one effect so we'll delete one of these and we're going to add the Sponge. I'm going to set mine to three, 25, and four. All of these little gray areas are what is going to become texture. These numbers determine what the texture looks like and how much of it. Depending on your preferences, you can adjust those. I just want a little bit coming through. We're going to click "OK". If we zoom in, we can see that there isn't any texture showing through. That's because we now need to adjust our Blend If settings so that that grays texture that we just put on it with the Sponge filter starts to become transparent. Let's double-click on our Layer, and I'll move this out of the way. Then let's bring this down quite a bit until we can start to see that texture. Right about there. Hit "OK". Now you can see the texture. If you want more texture, all you need to do is go back into the Filter Gallery and you can bring the smoothness down a little bit and the Brush Size down, and that will increase the texture. There you go. 6. Additional Tips: So now let's say that you're done with everything and you like how your texture is. But maybe you want to play around with the layout more like resizing this lettering and making it a little bit bigger. So let me show you what happens when you do that. If you increase the size, the smart object is going to regenerate and all the texture is going to change. So most of it disappears. We still got the rounded edges, but all that little areas where the lettering was chipped away a little bit, that's all different. So we would have to go back into the filter gallery and readjust that. But the way to get around that is, I'm going to undo this, is to flatten this. But before we do that, I'm going to duplicate my group just for a backup so that I always have that. So you can press "Command-J" on your keyboard. Now you have that copy and your original. So first, I'm going to turn off my original group and then when I duplicated that, I kind of messed up my clipping mask. So I need to reset that by holding option on the keyboard and clicking between those two layers. Now I need to fill that in my group one by pressing "Command-E" on the keyboard that flattens that group or you can go up to Layer, Merge Group. So once I have that done, now I can go ahead and resize it. The texture stays the same. Now, as you can see, it's no longer a smart object so you're not going to be able to go back and edit anything. But now you can apply more textures like for many of my other classes or any way you like to apply different things to it. 7. Reusing the Smart Effects: Now let's say that in the future you want to come back and you want to use this texture that you've already built. I'm going to show you how to swap out your artwork. I have this little alphabet text here and I'm going to swap it out in my smart object. The easiest way to do that is open up your smart object by double-clicking, you have it in here and then I'm going to go to the layer that I want to bring into my smart object, right-click on it and say duplicate layer, and then I'm going to pick my smart object. We'll know it's our smart object when it ends in psb. Once we have that selected, we'll click "Okay" and then we'll go over to our smart object tab, and you can see that our artwork is now in there. When we originally set up this file, the smart object was the size of our artwork, but now our artwork is bigger than that. We need to go in and change that canvas size and we'll just go ahead and change it to the size of our PSD. We'll uncheck relative, and I know that my document is 3000 by 1688. We'll click "Okay" and that will resize that, let's zoom out, you can set it up in there. Then I need to move my effects, drag it onto my layer, and then I can just delete these and then make sure to save so that our smart object updates. We'll go over here and then we'll just turn off our original texts that we don't need anymore and it's updated. If you want to adjust anything because your new artwork is different, just remember to go back into the filter gallery and I'll bring my distortion, let's bring it down to like five, click "Okay" and there we have it, there's our new artwork. 8. Thanks!: That's it guys. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you are able to easily follow along and get a lot out of this class. Make sure to post your class project to a Class Project page. I love seeing what you guys come up with. If you share it on Instagram, tag me @jamiebartlettdesign. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on the Community page. Thanks again for taking my class. I'll see you next time.