Make Metal Text Effects in Photoshop

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PHOTOSHOP Subscribe at www.adobe.com. TEXT ISN’T ALWAYS SOMETHING YOU’D THINK OF when using Photoshop, with many designers preferring to set it in InDesign or Illustrator instead, for more control over tracking, leading, and the arcane secrets of the typographer’s art. For eye-catching words or single lines, however, Photoshop does a perfectly acceptable job, with the advantage that you can use it to create colorful effects that make it leap off the page, or sink into a block of metal, as we’ll recreate here.

The Type tool is the T-shaped icon in the toolbar, which folds out to reveal four options. There’s the basic Horizontal Type tool, which we’ll be using here, and a Vertical Type tool, which does what you’d expect, plus horizontal and vertical versions of the Type Mask tool, which puts you in something like Quick Mask mode as you type, and with a click of a button leaves you with selection outlines of your type, rather than actual letters. 1 CREATE A BACKGROUND We’re going to need a suitably grungy background for our text to sit on, so start with a new, blank document at the size of your choice (we’ve gone with 4096x2160), and fill it with black. Then choose one of the brushes near the bottom of Photoshop’s built-in set—the ones that look as though you’re painting with a texture— and make it a few hundred pixels across. Paint white across your black background with low opacity settings, until you’ve got something you’re happy with, then choose the circular texture brush—the very last one in the default palette—and expand it to the width of your image (maximum 5,000 pixels). Paint white again, but this time with high opacity, and only click once or twice, so you get a pattern of dots [ Image A]. 2 ADD CORROSION Head over to the Filter Gallery and apply Chrome from the Sketch set. Mess with the settings, and you’ll get something that looks vaguely like metal, with the white dots you painted becoming depressions in the surface. If the result is a bit bright for your tastes, increase the contrast with “Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast” to darken the darker areas. If you’re lucky enough to have an old car decaying in your backyard, you can skip this step by heading out with your camera and taking a picture of its corroding metal yourself. 3 FIND A FONT On to the text. The choice of font is important here, because no one wants to see Comic Sans. Adobe bundles fonts with every Creative Cloud subscription through its TypeKit service, so if you don’t like what you’ve got installed, click “Add Fonts From TypeKit” on the Font menu drop-down to be taken to Adobe’s website [ Image B], from where you can browse and sync new fonts to your PC. They’re added to Photoshop’s Font menu without a restart. Type your text. 4 ADD SOME EFFECTS Right-click the text layer in the Layers palette and select “Blending Options.” This opens the Layer Styles window, and enables us to add effects to the type [ Image C]. Check the boxes of the effects you want to use in the left-hand column, but beware that checking a box doesn’t mean the controls in the window are affecting that effect. For this, you have to make sure you’ve clicked the name. We used Bevel and Emboss, and Inner Shadow. Play around with the settings until you’ve got something that you like the look of. For the color effect, add a Gradient Overlay, with red at the top and black at the bottom, using the direction wheel in the options to change the direction of the blend. Then hit “OK.” One of the best things about Photoshop’s text layers is that they’re not rendered until you flatten the image or specifically request it, so you can go back to tweak the settings at any time by double-clicking the layer in the Layers palette.

5 LAVA UP Other, lesser, magazines might have stopped there, but there are a few things we can do to make our text even more awesome. Adding a texture is one of them, and what could be more appropriate for our metal effect background than molten lava? To get a lava effect, the easiest thing to do is to climb your nearest volcano and shoot a picture straight into the caldera. Or search for a public domain image from the Internet. One of those, anyway. Once in possession of your lava image, open it in a separate tab from your main composition, hit Ctrl-A to select all, then Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Head back to your main image, and rightclick the text layer in the Layers palette. Select “Create Work Path,” then pop over to the Paths palette, select the work path, and convert it to a selection using the tiny dotted circle button at the bottom. Go to “Edit > Paste Special,” select “Paste Into,” and your lava image should appear within the boundaries of the text. If it’s too small, and you can see the edges, hit Ctrl-T for Free Transform, and stretch it out—any pixelation that’s caused by this process will be hard to spot because we can only see small parts of the image, and Photoshop is very good at upscaling. 6 GLOW WITH THE FLOW Our original lava-look lettering was a bit dark, so to brighten it up we pasted the texture image on to a new layer, which was placed on top of the stack in the Layers palette, leaving our original red lettering below it, but hidden. By changing the blend mode of the top layer to Screen, all the colors are lightened, so we’re left with a glowing look more appropriate for molten rock [ Image D]. When you’re happy with what you’ve created, use the Layers menu to flatten your image, then save it as a JPEG for use in other documents [ Image E].