How to Easily Create Glitch Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily create realistic glitch text effect in Photoshop within just 3 steps. Have a try!

This tutorial is written with beginners in mind. Along the way, you will get to practice several tools such as the liquify filter, gradient fill tool.

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

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Let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1440px * 700px. Download this stock photo and use it as our background:

Type some text using any font you like, I used the Bebas font:

Apply a gradient overlay on this text layer, you can any colour fill you like. I used the following blue/pink combination:

Duplicate this text layer once, remove the gradient overlay on the duplicated layer:

Move the duplicated layer slightly to the top-right direction, and here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Merge the 2x text layer into one layer. Right-click on the layer and select “Rasterize Type”. I recommend saving the previous editable text layers before you merge them, in case you need to change the text later:

Go to Filter > Liquify:

Select the Twirl Tool from the tool panel within the liquify fitler:

Apply this twirl effect all over the text:

Apply the liquify fitler, then drop the layer opacity of this layer to 60%:

and here is the effect:

Step 3

Duplicate the previous layer a few times and reduce the layer opacity to each of them to around 20%:

Move those duplicated layer left and right to the original layer, creating the glitch effect:

For final touches, we can flatten the image and duplicate the background layer, apply the following motion blur filter on duplicated layer:

Use a layer mask to hide the following red area, leaving the motion blur on the text only:

I further applied some colour adjustments to the overall 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 and I will try my best to answer it.