Create Electrified Metal Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps to Create Electrified Metal Text Effect in Photoshop. We will cover a number of selection techniques, as well as how we can use the right texture to form unique text effect.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Metal Texture

Lightning Texture

Step 1

Create a new document size 1280px * 720px with black background. Load the Metal Texture into Photoshop and select a portion of it, copy and paste the selection over to our document, resize it to fit our canvas size:

Use the eraser tool to remove part of the image as shown below, we will later on fill these with our text:

Add the following adjustment layers on top of this background texture layer:

Black and White (set this layer’s opacity to 80%)

Levels

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

We will now add the text onto the background texture. Let’s go back to the metal texture, use the quick selection tool to select a shape as shown below:

You can use the Refine Edge tool (Press Ctrl + Alt + R while selection is active) to adjust the selection if necessary:

Copy and paste the selection into our document, place it inside an erased portion of the background texture:

Repeat this process, copy and paste a few parts of the metal image onto our document, and to form the following letters:

Once you’re happy with the placement, merge all the text layers into one. Add a layer mask onto this merged layer, and use a soft eraser to fade the bottom part of the letters on the mask. This will add a bit of depth for the text:

Step 3

We will add a few adjustment layers as clipping masks to this text layer:

Black and White (set this layer opacity to 75%)

Levels

Curves

and here is the effect so far:

Step 4

We can now add the lighting texture over our text. Let’s select the merged text layer, and apply the following Refine Edge settings – this will add Feather to the selection:

Select the Rectangular Marquee tool, then drag and move the selection to the lightning texture:

Copy and paste the selection onto our image, and cover the metal:

Use a soft eraser to remove the following red parts of the lightning texture to add some variety and depth to the image:

Duplicate this lightning texture layer and set the duplicated layer’s blending mode to “Color Dodge”:

By setting it to color dodge, this will add some shining effect to the lightning:

Repeat the above process, add more lightning texture to the letters as shown below:

Step 5

We’re almost done :) To spice up the effect, I add some light effect as shown below – you can have a look at this tutorial for the creation of this effect:

We can also apply the following Reduce Noise filter to sharpen the lightning effect as shown below, after we flatten the image:

As you can see, the lightning looks more crisp after the filter application:

I added some colours with a number of adjustment layers (color balance and selective color) – I will leave this for you to experiment:

and this is my final effect: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial and find it useful. Drop me a comment below if you have any question.

Till next time, have a great day!