Final Product;
Layer Styles are an extremely powerful tool within photoshop. Today we are going to use layer styles to create a stylish blue text effect and save it to be used again. For a video of this tutorial please visit PsdLife.
Start by creating a new document, 1152px by 864px. Fill the background with #23b8d2. Duplicate the layer and apply the layer style gradient overlay from black to white.
Create a blank layer on top. Select the brush tool and set the foreground colour to #7de9f7 and the background colour to #026c89. Set up the brush options as shown below;
Now, paint on the blank layer until you have a nice mottled effect but not too heavy. I sometimes turn off the colour dynamics and place a few of the darker colours near the edges of the document.
Apply Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Set the blur to about 70 pixels.
Apply Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. Angle to 49 and amount to about 240.
Duplicate this layer and apply one more Motion blur, keeping the angle the same but turning down the amount to about 169.
Combine all layers on top, by pressing command>option>shift>e.
Apply Filter>Filter Gallery>Artistic>Watercolour.
Duplicate this layer.
Apply Filter>Filter Gallery> Plastic Wrap.
Turn the opacity on the watercolour down to about 45% and the plastic wrap layer to about 48%. Eyeball it to get what you like.
We are now going to add a slight vignette. Apply a levels adjustment layer. Set the output levels to 0,96 and the midpoint slider to 0.72.
Click on the mask for the levels layer. Draw a rectangle just around the inside using the rectangular marquee tool. Fill the rectangle with black.
In Cs6 double click the mask, in cs5 navigate to the masks window. Increase the feather amount until the square becomes nice and blended in.
On to the text!
I used the dear joe four font, but pretty much any font will work. The colour doesn’t matter and size was set to 300pt. Set the fill of the layer to 0%, so that we don’t see our text but we will see our layer styles. Center the text in the document.
Add the layer style Inner Shadow.
Inner Glow;
Satin;
Outer Glow;
And finally a Drop Shadow;
Our text is looking pretty good. If you are using a different font you may want to tweak these values a little bit.
With your layer styles window still open, click the new style button on the right. Name your style and press OK to save it and OK again to exit the layer styles.
Add a new layer below the text layer, using the circular marquee, draw an oval behind the text. Fill the circle with white, hit command “d” to deselect and go Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Set the Blur amount until the circle is nice and soft, about 60px. Turn the opacity on this layer down to about 85. This should add nice highlights to your text.
In my file a created I line with the pen tool and used the style we created to stroke it. You can find your new style under the style tab. If you do not see it go Window>Styles and it should pop up for you. You can also apply it to other shapes or text.
Lastly I created a darker vignette by going around the outside edges with a large soft black brush on a new layer. I set this layer to soft light and gave it a Gaussian blur of about 40px. The opacity was turned down a touch, eyeball it to see what you like.
If you wanted to use this effect on a different coloured background, simply change your colour values in the layers style panel.
Play around with it, and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.
