Design an Eye-Catching Cloud Text Effect in 3 Easy Steps with Photoshop

Elevate your design skills with our beginner-friendly tutorial on creating a captivating cloud text effect in just three simple steps. Learn how to use custom brush sets and brush options to achieve this striking result.

The PSD file of this tutorial is available via the PSD Vault VIP members area.

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:

Cloud Brush

Smoke Brush

Hot Air Balloon

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1400px * 700px, grab the Gradient Tool and fill the background layer with a light blue gradient:

Click to enlarge the following screenshot to reveal the colour code:

Use the cloud brush set you downloaded, paint some white cloud on a new layer and we will use this as our background:

Step 2

We will type some texts onto our canvas, I used the “Lucida Handwriting” font that comes with Photoshop:

Load the smoke brush into Photoshop and use the following set:

Press “F5” to bring up the brush options window, apply the following setting:

Shape Dynamics

Make sure you tick the “Smoothing” and “Protect Texture” option.

Use the brush, gently paint over the text as shown below, adjust the brush size accordingly:

Turn off the original text layer, and you will have the following effect:

Then on this newly painted cloud layer, apply the following “Bevel and Emboss” layer blending effect:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We will add some retouches to this effect. To make text slightly sharpen, we flatten the image and apply the following “Unsharpen Mask” filter (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharpen Mask):

We can paint some cloud under the text, just to make the text look like floating above the cloud:

Load the hot air balloon PSD File into Photoshop and add some hot air balloons into the image:

Finally we can use the same brush in step 2 to add some extra cloud texture around the text:

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

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Till next time, have a great day!