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August 19th, 2008 - Categories: Design, PS Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorial: Dark But Vivid Text Effect

In this tutorial we’re going to create a very simple text effect. A dark, colorful text effect. We will use the “the maple origins font” found at dafont.com.

Start by creating an empty file with a black background. Create a new layer and write something on it (White text). Rasterize and duplicate the layer. Now you should have the black background, layer 1 and layer 2 both with your text on them. Hide layer 2 and select layer 1:

Now go Layer -> Layer Style -> Gradient Overlay and create a Gradient like the image below using the Hex Values for colors as the ones below:

Apply the gradient and stay on the same layer. Now go to Filters -> Blur -> Motion Blur set the Angle to 0 (zero) and the Distance to 50 pixels. Apply the effect and duplicate the layer. You must end up with something like this:

and have the following layers:

Select the second layer from bottom (the one after the background) and go to Filters -> Distort – Waves and set the following values:

Note: The dimensions of my PSD is 500px X 300px and the Wave filter with these settings produce the following effect. You may have to experiment a little in order to get the same effect for higher dimensions.

Apply the effect, duplicate the layer and flip the new layer vertically. The result should be something like the image below:

Now, let’s reveal our top layer which is the white rasterized text and set it’s blend mode to Overlay. So, your layers now should be like that:

and your PSD should look like:

e are getting there. Having the top layer selected go Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation and press ok. Set the Hue value at +34, the Saturation value at +56 and leave the Lighting setting at zero. Press ok and you should have something like this:

Duplicate our top layer (white text) and set the Blend Mode to Overlay. By setting higher values to the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer we can get the following result.

And that’s it. My point in this tutorial is the smooth pastel colors that we used in the beginning which gave us more control of the Hue/Saturation values. It’s much easier for this kind of effects to go from soft colors to vivid ones rather the other way around.

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Comments

  1. Marcos Cousseau

    December 26, 2008

    Spectacular!!!!!!!!! thanks!!

  2. margot

    January 9, 2009

    Thanks a lot !! It is the first Tuto in which I succeed :D

  3. Live Video

    March 4, 2009

    Cool explained tutorial! Thanks!

  4. Ahmed Dashti

    March 20, 2009

    Everything is colorful in this site!
    Like That!

  5. naby

    March 27, 2009

    cool tuto !
    i like so much

  6. sathish

    April 10, 2009

    It’s verry verry nice

  7. ♥ SaD ♥

    May 13, 2009

    • it’s Nice
    • sTay CooL

  8. Showvhick

    May 24, 2009

    Very nice !!!!

    I like that

  9. Dante Jesús

    June 26, 2009

    Hola

    Muchas gracias por el tutorial, interesante y bien explicado.

    Gracias denuevo

    Saludos.

  10. Sam g

    June 30, 2009

    Interesting effect. Great work!

  11. nyamka

    July 6, 2009

    wow nice i like it.Thanks so much

  12. Tim

    July 9, 2009

    Once I have completed the motion blur, and duplicated the layer.

    I try to do Filter/Distort/Wave but the ‘wave’ option is not available.

    Can someone please assist? :P I’m using CS4 for mac.

    Thanks in advance.

  13. Tim

    July 9, 2009

    My apologies, I was in 16-bit :)

    Thanks

  14. Gerasimos

    July 9, 2009

    I am using CS3 and i was just about to search around if there’s a Wave effect in CS4 hehe :)

  15. Pratik Soni

    September 20, 2009

    Thanks a lot. i like it very much. it’s very nice.

  16. Anechka

    December 5, 2009

    Thank you for your work! I like your site very much!

  17. Frankenstine

    December 13, 2009

    Thank you. Great post

  18. nadia

    December 14, 2009

    very creative n interesting..also easy to learn..thanx alot!

  19. Stock-Vectors

    December 14, 2009

    Thank you. Great post

  20. aankha

    December 15, 2009

    thanks!!
    cool tutorial.. and you made them easy as well
    m thinking of trying all of it.. thanks again

  21. документальный фильм

    December 20, 2009

    Thank’s for the comments step by step.

  22. Spencer Jackson

    February 17, 2010

    I really like this effect, it’s cool, moody and electric. I’m only just starting out, but I’ll definately have a go.

    Thanks, Spencer

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