In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this cool-looking, awsome glowing edge text effect in Photoshop. Have a try!

Along the way, we will practice the use of Pen tool, layer blending options, texture painting and some image adjustments in Photoshop.

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

alternative version with cloud and more lighting effect:

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No Stock image is required for this tutorial. This tutorial is best for Photoshop CS2 or +.

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1300px * 780px, fill the background with black and create a new layer called “texture”, grab some grungy brushsets from the sites such as qbrushes.net or brusheezy.com, paint some texture on it:

After you’ve done the painting, hit “Ctrl + T” and right-click on the texture, choose “perspective” and narrow the top border the texture:

After you perspective the texture, scale the texture down as shown below:

Use a big soft brush to erase the edges of the texture so it blends into the background:

Duplicate this texture layer, resize it to a smaller piece, rotate and position the duplicated layer as shown below:

Duplicate the grungy texture layer once more, this time position it to the right:

Step 2

Now type some texts on the canvas. You can use any text you like, the one I used for this tut can be downloaded here.

Apply the following layer blending options to this text layer:

Drop Shadow

Outer Glow

Bevel and Emboss

Contour

Stroke

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 3

Now we’re onto creating the level effect for the text. We can do this by simple duplicated the original text layer twice, adjust the layer opacity of each text layer according to the settings below:

Move each layer a bit away from each other:

and this is the overall effect so far:

Now we will add the glowing edge effect for the text layer. To do this, load the selection of the text layer (any one of the three):

Click on the Rectangular Marquee tool (or press “M” key):

then right-click inside the selection, choose “make work path”:

set tolerance to “2.0″ pixels:

and you will have the following work path created around the text:

click the Pen tool symbol from the toolbox, right-click on the work path and choose “stroke path”:

Use the following 5px hard round brush:

and with “Simulate Pressure” setting enabled:

Stroke the work path. You will have the following effect:

Step 4

Now we can add some lights on the bottom of the text so it blends better with the texture. To do this, create a new layer on top of all previous layers called “light” and grab a big soft brush, do a single-click as shown below:

Compress this light layer and move it the bottom of the text:

Use Warp tool to adjust the light, in order to fit the curve of the texture:

Step 5

Now let’s add some shadow for the text. Create a new layer on top of all previous layer called “shadow”, load the selection of the one of the text layer, fill the selection with black colour:

Hit “Ctrl + T” and right-click, choose “Flip Vertical”:

Perspective this shadow layer as shown below:

Apply the following Gaussion Blur settings to it:

Move the shadow layer down and change its blending mode to “soft light”, you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now create a new layer on top of all previous layer, name it “Abstract line” and grab the Pen Tool, draw a random path as shown below:

If you feel like some adjustments, you can hold “Ctrl” key and drag the anchor points to change the path:

Stroke the path using the same settings as previous step: (5px hard round brush, simulate pressure)

Now add a layer mask on this abstract line layer to hide some portion of the lines behind the text:

(Hint: to quickly add this mask, load the selection of the top-most text layer, then click on the layer mask, and go to Edit > Clear to clear out the text portion)

You can see by adding this layer mask we can hide the parts of the abstract line:

You can also duplicate this abstract line layer a few times for more effect (disable the layer mask for the duplicated layers, and resize those layers for depth)

Step 7

OK we’re nearly done. To finish up this effect, we can add a few adjustment layer to fine-tune the color and lighting contrast.

I added the following adjustment layers on top of all previous layers:

Color Balance

Curves

and here is the final effect for this tutorial:

I also made an alternative version with cloud and extra lights added to it: (click to enlarge)

OK that’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful and inspirational. If you have any question, drop a comment below and I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!