tutorial 2

Wordsmith James Paterson shows you how to create a text portrait and get to grips with key features like clipping masks and layer styles

Discover how to create an ethereal text-covered portrait

Master a few simple skills and you can create all kinds of amazing creative effects in Photoshop. Here we’ve combined three such features – layer styles, clipping masks and layer groups – to give us the ethereal text-covered portrait you see above.

Layer styles are one of the jewels in Photoshop’s crown. They work by adding an effect to a layer, either across the entire surface of it, or more commonly around the edges. We’ve used the Drop Shadow layer style here. Beloved by designers for the way they help text stand out against a background, drop shadows are useful for all kinds of design tasks. But here, we’re going to put them to a different use.

This brings us onto the next key feature – clipping masks. This is a handy setting you can add to any layer – once enabled, it makes the layer interact differently than normal with the layers below it. The layer becomes ‘clipped’, which means it’ll only show through in places occupied by the layer it has been clipped to. Designers will often use clipping masks to confine an image to text or another shape, and here we’ll take that idea one step further. Rather than clipping an image to the shape of text, we’ll instead hide the text so that only the drop shadow part remains – we can do this by dropping the layer’s Fill value to 0 – then we’ll clip our portrait to the drop shadow.

We’ve supplied a starting image but why not use your own? The effect will work on any portrait that has a dark backdrop.