In this Photoshop tutorial, you will how to create a great-looking, melting gold text effect in Photoshop. We will use a combination of layer blending techniques, as well as clipping masks and custom brushes to achieve this effect. Have a try!
This is an intermediate difficulty tutorial. You will need Photoshop CC or above to complete this tutorial.
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)
PSD Vault VIP Membership
You can download the PSD File for this tutorial via the VIP Members Area for only $6.95/Month (or less)! You will not only get this PSD File, but also 250+ other PSD Files & 50+ VIP Exclusive Photoshop tutorials there. Signup now and get exclusive!
OK Let’s get started!
To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:
Update November 2019
If you have any difficulty with applying gold texture onto the text, check out this video:
Step 1 – Background Preparation
Create a new document sized 1440px * 800px with black background. Load the Gold Texture into Photoshop, cover the entire image and paste it onto our canvas. Use a soft eraser to fade the edge of the texture as shown below:
Apply the following Levels adjustment to this gold texture:
And this is the effect so far:
Step 2 – Adding the Texts
Use the font we download, type some texts over our document:
Apply the following layer blending modes to this text layer:
Gradient Overlay
Drop Shadow
And this is the effect so far:
Step 3 – Applying Gold Texture
Go back to the gold texture layer, select the following portion with the rectangular marquee tool:
Cover the text with this texture:
Right-click on this new texture layer, and select “Create Clipping Mask”:
Repeat the above process, add another smaller gold texture piece to cover the word “text”, set it as clipping mask, and set the blend mode to “Vivid Light”:
And this is the effect so far:
Step 4 – Making the Gold Text Melting!
Go to the gold texture and create a new, empty layer. Use the liquid brush we downloaded, paint the following pattern over the new layer:
Select this paint area, and go back to the background, copy this selection:
Paste the selection over to our document, re-size and fit our text as shown below:
Set the layer blend mode to “Color Dodge” for this gold texture layer – this will form a melting effect for our texture:
Repeat this process, add the melting effect to the left side texts:
Step 5 – Final Touch-ups
We will work on the final touch-ups for this melting gold text effect in this step. Again we can go to the gold texture, use a Lasso Tool (set its feather setting to 40px) to select the following area:
Place it over our texture:
Set its blend mode to “Vivid Light” – this adds highlights for our text:
We can also flatten the image and duplicate this background layer, and apply the following “Ocean Ripple” filter:
Make sure you save a copy of your layered file in case you wish to edit it later.
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.