Creating Eye-catching Text
with Adobe Photoshop 

By HASMITA CHANDER

Words. Lettering. Titles. Headings. Text. Used everyday and everywhere. Sometimes you’ve looked at a nameplate, a company logo, and thought, “That looks dull. I wish I could colour it better; make it stand up, look me in the eye and say boldly, smartly, what it is now struggling so dismally to. 

Your wish is granted with Photoshop. You can use it to make a variety of text effects from simple and classy to wild and flamboyant. They can be used in making e-cards, greeting cards, T-shirt transfers, book cover designs, Web pages, advertisements--you name it. 

While there are countless ways of making creative text, we’ll learn of two techniques which can yield some excellent results. After that you’ll know how to innovate and experiment.

 Textured Text

Let’s jump in and make some stone-textured text, the kind you see in magazines and advertisements.

  • The Stone texture. Open the file, "Stone.jpg", Select-All (Ctrl+A), Copy and Paste into a new file. When you copy and then create a new file, you’ll notice that you will automatically get a file of the exact size. Name this layer “Stone”.

  • Type the word. Select the Type Mask Tool which is hidden behind the normal Type Tool (click on the Type Tool and hold it; the Type Mask Tool option will slide out.) Click on the picture. The text window comes up. Type the word “TERRAIN” in it, selecting the font of your choice and size about 70, depending on the font. Say “OK” when you’re ready.

  • Get the texture. You’ll see the text on the picture but with selection dashes running around. This means that the selection is active, but nothing has been filled in it. Edit-Copy to copy the stone texture in the shape of the selected area.

  • Outline it. Paste into a new layer and name the layer “First text”. Select-All in this layer and Ctrl-Up arrow to select only the text. Choose a dark grey and Edit-Stroke with Stroke = “1” and Location = “Centre”.

  • Make a shadow. This looks OK but you want it to look more three dimensional. Keep the selection as is and create a new layer, “Shadow”. Fill the selection with dark grey. Feather with Select-Feather, Feather radius = 3. Fill again with the same grey using Alt-Del. 
    (Newer versions of Photoshop have ready Shadow features, but it's always cool to know how to do it manually)

  • Create an offset. Move the layer “Shadow” below “First Text”. Keeping the Shadow layer selected, click on the Move Tool and with the keyboard arrow keys, move a step or two to the left and a couple down.

This is the main thing and it’s done, but now is the fun part - you create variations.

 Grains

  • Create a new layer under the “Shadow” layer, “Grains”. Pick a beige or a colour that’s close to the background stone and with a thick brush, say size 100, spray with an opacity of about 50%, just enough to surround the text a little.
     

  • From the Filter menu, choose the “Add Noise” filter. Enter a value of about 12 in the “Amount”, choose “Gaussian” and check “Monochromatic”. Say OK.

 

Cut stone

If you want it to look like you’re writing on a slab of stone, try this:

  • Select the “Stone” layer. Using the Lasso Tool, draw a rough outline around the text and copy it. Paste in a new layer, “Cut Slab”.

  • Hide the “Stone” layer by switching off the visibility (Eye icon). Now you can see the slab. Create a shadow for the slab in a new layer under it as described earlier.

  • In yet another layer beneath the shadow of this slab, fill with a plain colour which you feel blends with the stone.

With these variations done, you can still fiddle around to see what you like best - hide one layer, then another… For a simple look, keep just the First text, Shadow, Grains and the plain colour layer. Try out different combinations like this.

 

Fantastic 3D Text

This technique can be used not only for text but for anything in Photoshop. It’s simple to do and looks really impressive.

Type the word: Take a new file, say 300 by 120 in size. Type out a word in any colour, I’ve chosen Hot Pink.

Background colour: In a layer beneath this, fill the entire area with another colour.

Feather: Select only the text from the text layer and feather to 4 pixels. Create a layer under it (between the background colour and the text) with the selection active.

Create a flush: Click on the Foreground colour swatch in the Tool Palette. The “Color Picker” window pops up. Here we’ll choose a lighter shade of the pink. We do this by reducing the Saturation value. The value was 100% in the colour I chose, so I reduced it to 50% by typing “50” in the Saturation box. Now fill the selection with Alt-Del. Name this layer “Flush”.

Noise: Select the Text layer and do a Noise Effect on it (Filter-Add Noise) with a value of 70.

Merge layers: Now we will merge the “Flush” layer and the text layer. See to it that only these two are visible, i.e., hide the plain coloured background. With one of these layers active, choose “Merge Visible” from the Layer menu.

Three-D text! With this layer active, we’ll apply the magical 3D filter. Filter-Render-Lighting Effects takes you to the Lighting Effects window where you can adjust the angle of incidence of light falling, how much light you want, etc. In the “Texture Channel” there’s a drop down list which has “None”, “Red”, “Green”, “Blue” and another layer which is the one that’s currently active. Select this last one and say OK. Make the plain coloured background visible now.

Doesn’t that look hot!

Now that you’ve tackled two powerful capabilities in Photoshop, you’ve grown wings to soar - experiment, make mistakes, learn - you’ll see some wonderful results for sure.

Type Tool Info

In Photoshop 4.0, the problem with the Type Tool is that you can’t make changes to the text after effects have been applied on it - you’d have to redo everything from scratch. This problem disappears in Photoshop 5.0. Here the text remains editable till you want to freeze it. After making effects, you can go to the Text layer and edit the font, size etc. and the effects will appear on this. When you want to freeze, use Render Layer from the Layer menu.

Terms in the Type Tool window:

Font: This is the shape of the text - there are several on your computer and you can get more from CDs and the Internet. Eg. Times New Roman, Courier, Sans Serif, Brush Script.

Spacing: This defines the gap between letters in the word. If you want letters to be far apart, use a higher value of Spacing. 

Leading: This is the space to be left before the word begins.

Alignment: This is the same as a word processor - Align Left, Centre and Right. But here you also have Vertical alignment in which text is placed one below the other.

Style: This is also similar to a word processor - Bold, Italic, Underlined - but you have a few more options like Outline and Strike through.

The box below these options is a preview of the text you’ve selected. Below this you can select if you want to preview the font alone or the size as well.

Note: This tutorial refers to Adobe Photoshop 4.0; the latest version might have slightly different menu positions and tools.

Drop shadow options explained:

Mode: This allows you to see different modes of applying the shadow. Try them out – some are hardly noticeable but some are pronounced, for example, the “Dissolve” mode, which gives a spray effect.

Opacity: This is familiar to you, it varies the opacity of the shadow – 100% makes a dark shadow, 10% is a hardly visible one.

Angle: This is to set the direction of light falling on the object or selection. When you click on this, you get a circle with a line. You can hold and drag the line to change the direction of light. The light falls from the circumference of the circle towards the middle, the middle standing for the object.

Distance: Is the distance of the shadow from the object.

Blur: This is how soft you want the edges of the shadow to be – set it to 0 and you will see it becomes a hard-edged one.

Intensity: varies the strength of the shadow. It goes up to 600%, which creates a thick outlined shadow – unrealistic…