Design a Cool Abstract-Style Shattered Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool, abstract style shattered text effect with Broken Glass Texture in Photoshop.

Together, we will explore various layer blending options, image adjustment and some basic selection techniques. I also included a nice link containing a list of “Clean Text” which you might find useful for your design project.

It’s not a complicate tutorial in my opinion, however the effect looks rather cool. Have a go :)

Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document size 900 * 700px. Then create a new layer named “Gradient Fill” on top of the background layer. On this layer, we can create some background lighting effect.

On the “Gradient Fill” layer, fill it with #494949 colour, then press “G” key to select the Gradient Tool, use the Radial gradient option and fill the layer with the following colours: (Make sure you select the “Foreground colour to transparent” option as well)

Step 2

Type some texts on top of the “Gradient Fill” layer. This will automatically create a new layer, call it “text”.

As for font choice, I would suggest you use some clean fonts  to maxmise the effect. Here is a nice collection of clean font and you can choose from: Clean font showcase. From the list, I chose this font for the tutorial.

Position the text as shown below:

On the “text” layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay

The effect so far will look like this:

Step 3

Now can apply the Broken Glass Texture on the text to create shattered effect.

Download a copy of this Broken Glass Texture image (image 1) from CG Texture. Load it into Photoshop. Go back to our document and load the selection of the text layer (To do this, hold down the Ctrl key and left click the thumbnail image of the text layer in the layer palette).

Drag the selection onto the Broken Glass Texture you’ve just downloaded, copy and paste a portion of the texture back to our document. This will create a new layer on top of the “Text” layer, name it as “Glass Texture”.

Change the layer blending option of this texture layer to “Overlay” and you will have the following effect:

Step 4

On the “Glass Texture” layer, apply the following Black and White adjustments:

Then hit Ctrl + J and duplicate this texture layer 5-6 times and you will have the following effect:

Step 5

Now we have a shattered text, then I thought: umm, perhaps it will be nice to add some water drop on top of it? I guess that will be an interesting effect.

So I downloaded a copy of this image from CG Texture and load it into Photoshop. Go back to our document and load the text selection again, drag it onto the water drop texture, copy and paste a portion of that texture image back onto our text document.

This will again generate a new layer, name it as “Water Drop Texture”.

Change the layer blending option to “Soft Light”, again we duplicate the “Water Drop Layer” 5-6 times, and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

To add a bit of flavour onto the effect, we can create a new layer called “Cloud”, use the Lasso Tool with 40px feather, make a selection around the texture and render some cloud: (Set foreground colour to White, background to Black):

Change the layer blending option of this cloud layer to “Hard Light” and you will have the following effect:

Step 7

Download a copy of this image and load it into Photoshop. Copy and paste the entire image onto our document and place it just a above the background layer, but below all other layers. Name this layer as “Glass Shattering”.

Hide the “Gradient Fill” layer for now.

Duplicate the “Glass Shattering” layer a couple times, and on each duplicated layer, use the Free Transform tool (Ctrl + T) to rotate, resize and distort the texture to make some more shattering effect:

Merge the duplicated layers and apply the following Black and White Adjustments:

You will have the following effect as a result:

Step 8

Now we can add some colour overlay on top of the text. A quick way to do this is to create a new layer on top of all other layers and set the blending mode to “Color Dodge”, then grab a big soft round brush with some colour of your choice, and simply paint over the text.

The result effect will look like this:

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can apply some more texture onto the text itself, or add some background texture, that’s totally up to you :)

Here is my final image for this tutorial: (Click to Enlarge)

If you have any questions, just drop me a comment :)

Cheers and have a nice day!