Design a Smooth and Fresh Text Effect with Leaves and Stone Texture in Photoshop

Posted on March 24th, 2009 under Text Effects, it has 33 Comments and 24,670 Views so far.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate the processes I used to design this soft and smooth, fresh feeling text effect with leaves and stone texture in Photoshop. I was having a play with Photoshop on the weekend (when the site was down) and discovered the interesting effect accidentally :)

Along the way, we will be using and revising techniques such as masking, layer blending options, adjustment layers, and a quick way of creating uneven lighting effect. I will also show you how I create a light source in conjunction with the shadow effect on the text. Have a go!

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

OK let’s get started!

Step 1

Firstly we need to download the following textures:

Wall Texture

Leaves

Load the wall texture in photoshop, duplicate the background layer once and set it as “soft light”, you can see the background texture darken a bit: (Personally I would like to make the overall light darker a bit and later on it will be easier to create light source and other lighting effects)

1-duplicate1

Make another duplicate of the background layer and drag it to the top, add a vector mask to the duplicated layer. Hold down the Alt key and left click on the mask thumbnail on the layer palette, use a big soft brush to draw a black line across the centre of the canvas:

1-erase

You will see the centre portion of the image is now highlighted, whereas the rest of the image being further darkened. We will be placing our text on the highlighted area:

1-effect1

Step 2

Type some texts using this font you just downloaded on the centre of the canvas:

2-type-text

Apply the following blending options:

General Blending

2-blending-options

Drop Shadow

2-drop-shadow

Inner Glow

2-inner-glow

Bevel and Emboss

2-bevel

Contour

2-contour

Gradient Overlay

2-grad-overlay

And you will have the following effect (the text become transparent and you can see the stone texture appears on the text)

2-effect3

Step 3

Now let’s add some freshness onto the text. Load the “Leaves” texture into photoshop, go back to our document and load the selection of the text layer (ctrl+left-click the thumb of the text layer on the layer palette). Drag the selection onto the leaf texture as shown below:

3-drag-selection

Copy the selection and paste in back to our document:

3-paste

Name the newly created layer as “leaf”. Apply the following Gaussian Blur setting to it:

3-gau-blur

Change the layer blending option as shown below:

3-blending

Duplicate the leaf layer once and apply the following blending option to the duplicated layer:

3-blending-2

And you will have the following effect to the text:

3-effect3

Step 4

Now let’s create some uneven lighting and give some depth to the image. Create a new layer and name it as “lighting overall”, use the Lasso Tool with a 30px feather to draw a selection as shown below:

4-lasso-tool

Go to Filter > Render > Cloud (set foreground colour to #555555 and background colour to black) and render some cloud inside the selection:

4-cloud

Set the blending mode of this layer to “Soft light” and duplicate it a couple of times. You will have the following effect: (The centre portion of the image become highlighted so it’s easier to focus on the text)

4-effect4

Step 5

Now let’s create a light source for this image. Duplicate the “lighting overall” layer one more time and rename it “light source”. Drag this layer to the top and go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare and apply the following settings:

5-lens-flare

Then use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl + T), rotate, distort this layer until it look similar to the image shown below (light coming from the top right corner)

5-distort

Set the blending mode to “overlay” and you will have the following effect:

5-effect3

Step 6

To further adjust the lighting contrast, we can add a few new adjustment layers on top of all previous layers. Firstly we can add a new curves adjustment layer and apply the following settings:

6-curves

Then add a new Level adjustment layer and apply the following settings:

6-level

And you will have the following image as a result:

6-effect2

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can have a play with layer blending options and add a few more adjustment layers (hue and saturation, channel mixer) and see what result it gives you!

Here is my final image for this tutorial: (I added some colours and reduce the saturation a bit)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

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33 Comments

CjFOR Says:
realy is cool ….
psaddict Says:
Added to http://www.psaddict.com
Niklas Says:
Hey,what happend with psdv it was down and had networkprobs what was that about?!
Nice tutorial btw
cheers!
take care!
joyoge designers' bookmark Says:
nice tutorial, looks like realistic..
CjFOR Says:
James add’s more tuts please ^_^
TILMID Says:
good tutorial.
thanks for you all.
i like photoshop.
admin Says:
@Niklas: yeah the bandwidth issue was because I used up my allocated traffic limit for this month :)
admin Says:
@CjFOR: more to come that’s for sure!
admin Says:
@TILMID: glad you like it!
Brochures Says:
Good tutorial! I wish you used a different font though, so that the texture details are more noticeable. A very interesting post, thanks for sharing this!
Rajita- logo design Says:
Superb Design
CjFOR Says:
@James , we’ll be wait
Accounting Teacher Says:
Can you provide action of this effect (if possible)?
It will be very helpful
admin Says:
@Accounting Teacher: I’m sorry, but I can’t really produce action for this tutorial.
tiffany Says:
I think on some of these stpes you could have explained them better. Personally thought that it was hard to keep up with and im generally good at photoshop. Next time you might want to ecxplain the steps better and tell exactly where to find things.
shshbsff Says:
He kinda did and if you’re “really good at photoshop” you’d know what hes talking about and where it is.

Nice effect.
Deadman Says:
Awesome tutorial! Thx to author! Here is mine:
http://imagepix.org/image/27196707d96c55a2af08a5e341231efd.html
Phayne Says:
BEAUTIFUL EFFECT!!! WOW!!!!! Thank you for your guidance!!!
restauración fotográfica Says:
Una restauración fotográfica muy logrado divertido y interesante. A mi me encanta este website.
huwaw69 Says:
i like the second result the background has more vibrant color…
jeyaganesan.m Says:
So nice.
Look Beautiful.
Superb Design.
Kaplang Says:
wow your designs are totally amazing, I am bookmarking you so that I can learn more, thanks :)
yarenay Says:
our professional. realy