Monday, May 30, 2011

How To Make A Flame Text In Photoshop

Creating your own logo, wallpaper, theme, greeting cards, blog titles, or anything that necessitate texts or fonts is somewhat fulfilling and fun. Why? It's because you create yourself what exactly you want. If you know already the basics and quite familiar with Photoshop, it will be easy for you to follow the steps and technique in creating various text effects. Don't worry much if your creation don't look so perfect because that is achieved gradually (a lot of time and practice, actually). What will matter most anyway is that if you are happy with your work and continuously striving to improve it.

Well, here, I'll show you how to create a flame-effect text using Photoshop, step-by-step.

1. Selecting the Background and Foreground Colors.
  •      By default, your BG/FG colors is set to black/white, and interchangeable. We'll use this temporarily.
  • Or, as in this tutorial, you may use a grungy-textured background.
 2. Select Font, Type Text, and Blending Options
  •      Select a relatively big font. I use Trajan Pro, 72px.
  • Type the text you want to appear and work with, like "APOY" which I use here, then duplicate it. The duplicated text layer ("apoy") will now appear as "apoy copy".
  • Double-click the "apoy copy" layer in the dialog box, then proceed with the following Blending Option settings:
  1. check Outer Glow, then click Ok.
  2. double-click Outer Glow in the layer dialog box, click the color box, and set the color to #ffb017; click Ok.
  3. double-click again Outer Glow in the layer dialog box, this time, click Inner Glow style, Opacity to 100, color to #ff9c00, size to 11px.
3. Setting the Flame
  • Select the Smudge Tool and set the following settings: Hardness=25, Strength=75, Diameter=20.
  • With the "apoy copy" selected, use Smudge Tool to make wisps of flames each of the typed letters (e.g., FLAMES).
4. Enhancing the Flames
  • Turn the "apoy copy" into a selection by holding down Ctrl key and clicking its layer icon in the layers dialog.
  • Inverse the selection by going to Select>Inverse.
  • Press Delete key.
  • Deselect by pressing Ctrl + D.
  • Turn the "flame copy" again into a selection by holding Ctrl key and clicking its icon in the layer dialog box.
  • Create a new layer by clicking the new layer icon located below the layer dialog box.
  • Bring up the Fill dialog window by pressing Shift + Backspace and, under Contents, select White. Click Ok.
  • Deselect by pressing Ctrl + D.
  • Set the blending mode to Overlay.
5. Optional (Type a quotation under the typed text)
  • Blending Options>Effects settings: (check the following)
          > Drop Shadow
          > Bevel and Emboss
          > Color Overlay
          > Satin
By the way, I added a border from one of Photoscape's border selections. Below is the final outcome.

So, that's it!