To begin with we need to set up our document. Open up which ever version of Adobe Photoshop you plan to use (note that I’ve used Photoshop CS for this tutorial) and go to File -> New or press CTRL + N on your keyboard. You should be presented with a screen which looks similar to the following (depends on the version of Adobe Photoshop you are using).
Enter the same information as displayed in the image above, the important things have been highlighted in blue. When you have created the new image colour in the pre-created layer with #91CFF7.
The next step is to create our text, so select the text tool and open up the character panel. If you don’t have this open then go to Window -> Character. This should open a window similar to this :-
You need to copy all off the setting from this panel, in case you can’t read the colour value it is #67A5CD . You are now ready to type the text, you may enter any text you wish I picked Arutha just to stick with a personal convention. You are going to have something that looks like this :-
Whats next? Well we are now going to give our text some life, the effects that I’ve used on this text are the following:-
- Drop Shadow
- Inner Shadow
- Gradient Overlay
- Stroke
Drop Shadow
This is the Drop Shadow layer style screen it will let us put a shadow under the text, that little bit off dark shading under the heavy white stroke in the first picture. If you are using Adobe Photoshop CS you may have noticed that I have only changed the size to 10px. Copy the settings from this screenshot, there isn’t really anything to explain here. You need to bare in mind that you may need to tweak some off these layer effect settings depending on the text you are using. You are going to have something that looks like this :-
Inner Shadow
Rather than shadowing we are using this Inner Shadow to make the text lighter than it was before, this is achieved using the Linear Dodge blending mode and the colour #0F5868. I haven’t changed the contour so you don’t need to worry about that but when it comes to copying the Distance, Choke and Size take the values with a pinch of salt because you text may be different to mine and therefore need little tweaks. A quick digression, what are Distance, Choke and Size? Well size is obvious it measures the size of the Inner Shadow. The distance measures determines how far the Inner shadow travels from its initial point. The choke determines how much off the Inner Shadow shades down. Back to business, your text should look something like :-
Gradient Overlay
We are using the gradient overlay to give the text effect a bit of depth. I’m using a gradient of (left to right) 1865A0 -> 80B1DF and I have changed the scale to 102% to push that lower colour a bit lower than normal. I haven’t changed the gradient boundaries, In case you are unsure what that means I have included a picture below.
As you can see from the picture above the point in the middle hasn’t moved, this is the default state for this and shouldn’t be changed in this case. You should now have some text that looks a bit like this :-
Stroke
We are onto the final layer effect, this is what really makes the text effect itself.
When doing this effect you are looking to make sure there are no gaps between the letters or holes on the stroke, some combinations of letters may require a larger stroke size. The colour I have used is White or #FFFFFF. We have now completed the layer effects but we arn’t quite finished with the text yet. You should have something that looks like this at the moment :-
We now want to make a selection of the text only, this doesn’t include the stroke. This can be achieved by CTRL + Click on the layer, you should have a selection which looks like this :-
After you’ve made a selection select the Elliptical Marquee Tool from your tool box (see image below)
You then to hold the ALT key as you make a selection which will cut the current selection to leave you with the following image. If you get it wrong just go to Edit -> Undo and try again, it may take a few attempts to get the selection you want.
Now that we have this selection you want to create a new layer, call it whatever you want its not really important. Then you want to go to Edit -> Fill and you will get the following message box.
Press Ok and then CTRL + D to deselect the selection you made and then change the layers opacity to 12%. You should have something like this :-
Its looking good but not quite finished yet, we are now going to play with some brushes so load up a new image by going to File -> New or press CTRL + N on your keyboard. Make the size 10px x 10px and open it up. You then want to select the custom shape tool and select the diamond shape, you can see the settings for the tool below :-
Then create the shape as large as you can on the page ( you may want to zoom into 1600% to do this).
Now you have this shape you will want to create a new brush with it. You can do this by firstly rasterizing the layer. Right click on the layer in the layer panel and select Rasterize Layer. This will remove the vector component of the shape, that’s what allows you to make it any shape without distortion. Now you have done this we can make it into a brush. Go to Edit -> Define Brush Preset… and name the brush whatever you wish, I just left the default name in this case. Now you have the brush we can finally finish off the text effect, however firstly we will want to use the brush panel to make the brush do that scatter and fade thing you saw earlier. Go to Window -> Brushes or hit F5 to open up the brushes panel.
Change you brush panel to look like the three following images
In this settings panel we are scattering the brush, this means that we are creating multiple instances of the brush on button press. We are scattering them 1000% the distance from the centre to give the furthest distance between brushes however the process is random and therefore some will overlap, but that’s ok 
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We are now altering the shape of the brush, we are altering the size, and angle. I have set a minimum diameter so we can see them all they arn’t just pixel dots.
In this final panel we are affecting the opacity and flow of the brush. I have also set the Fade Control this means that it causes the brush to fade out, we want it to fade out quickly because we aren’t running it down a path just clicking.
You now want to set your foreground colour to #286EB0 and create a new layer. From now its up to you how much or little you put on and where you do it, this is totally dependant on the text. I try to keep it to one side so it looks like its fading through the text. Below is another look at the finished product :-
That’s all folks.
This tutorial was written exclusively for 13dots by: Arutha
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