How to Easily Apply Texture to Your Text in Photoshop with Clipping Masks

Ever seen those “stone” or “metal” looking text effect appearing in movie poster & game cover art, and wondered how those texts are made? The answer is, that those effects are achieved through adding texture to text in Photoshop via a simple technique.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily apply texture to your text in Photoshop with clipping masks technique. This method can be used to apply any texture to your text and it is easy to learn. For demo purpose, we will be making a metal-textured, medieval text for this tutorial.

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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 1
• Metal Texture 2
• Font
• Fire Texture
• Fractal Brushes (pick any one set from the list)

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1400px * 770px with black background. We will start by preparing a nice background for our text.

Load the “Metal Texture 1” image into Photoshop, copy & paste the entire image to our canvas. Use the free transform tool to adjust the size of the texture to fit the size of our document:

Reduce the layer opacity for this metal texture layer to around 24%:

Apply the following image adjustments to this metal texture layer:

Black & White

Levels

And here is the effect so far:

Use the fractal brushes you downloaded, paint some fractal patterns over the texture. The fractal painting should only be barely visible – so please make sure you set your brush opacity to around 20%:

Step 2

Use the font we downloaded and type some characters onto our canvas:

Apply the following layer blend options to the text layer to give it a bit of depth:

Bevel and Emboss

Drop Shadow

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We will be applying the metal texture to our text in this step. Load “Metal Texture 2” image into Photoshop. Make a selection as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection to our canvas, cover the text as shown below:

Right-click on this new metal texture layer and select “Create Clipping Mask”:

And you will see the following effect over the text:

To darken the metal texture over the text, I duplicated the metal texture layer twice and set both duplicated layer as clipping masks. Then I changed the layer blend mode for these 2x new layers to “Color Burn” and “Multiply” respectively:

And this is the result you after making the above adjustments:

Step 4

We will be adding fiery effect onto the text in this step. Load the fire texture into Photoshop and make a selection as shown below, using the Lasso Tool with “Feather:40px” setting:

Copy and paste the selection to our document, change its layer blend mode to “screen”, place it over the texture as shown below:

Repeat the above process, add more fire elements around the canvas:

Step 5

We’re almost done! To touch-up the final result, I added some subtle grunge brush painting below the text:

I further added some highlights for the text with the fractal brushes:

Also slightly adjusted the colour balance of the image, and this is my final result: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Leave me a comment below if you have any questions. Enjoy it? Help me share it around by using the share buttons at the top of the tutorial!