Displacement Text Effect
Programs Used: Photoshop 6
Skill Level: Advanced
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The Displacement filter is a much under-used Photoshop tool that
can create some great text and background effects. This tutorial will
show you how to create text that follows the contours of a cloth.
1. Open up Photoshop and create a New Canvas (600x200).
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2. Using the Paint Bucket tool, fill the canvas with your chosen
background colour (in this case, pink).
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| 3. The next step is to create a cloth-like effect, that our Displacement
Map will follow. Alternatively, you may want to photograph or scan in
an actual piece of cloth - that would work even better.
Create a New Layer. Select a feathered Airbrush of around
100 pixels in size, and change the brush colour to a darker shade of pink.
Now use the Airbrush to draw in the darker folds of the cloth, like so:
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4. Now select a lighter shade of pink, and a smaller brush size,
to draw in the highlights:
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5. Now, to tighten our texture up a bit, Merge the three layers,
then go to Filter > Other> Minimum, and select a Radius
of about 3 pixels.
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6. Finally, to finish our texture, go to Image > Adjust > Levels,
and bring the overall colour balance up a bit to create more contrast
between the cloth's colours:
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7. Now for our Displacement Map. Make a copy of the cloth background
layer, and rename this new layer Displacement Map.
Next, select Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation and pull the
saturation control right down. Now go to Image > Adjust > Levels
again, and pull the levels right in.
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The Displacement filter works on greyscale colour values. The
closer together the levels are, the more Displaced our text will
be.
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7. Now, without flattening our image, go to Save As and call the
file Disp_map1.psd.
8. Now for our text! Hide the Displacement Map layer, then write
some text in white on a new layer. Next, go to Filter > Distort
>Displace. Use the following parameters:
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Press OK, and then select our file Disp_map1.psd and click
on Open.
Excellent! The text now follows the contours of the cloth - but we're
not finished yet! The last step is to add highlights and shadows to the
displaced text.
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9. Firstly, select and Unhide the Displacement Map layer.
Press Ctrl-A, then Ctrl-C to copy its' contents.
Next, right-click on your text layer, so that the outlines of
the text are highlighted.
Make a New Layer, and finally go to Edit > Paste Into.
Call this new layer Text Shading.
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10. Nearly finished! Select the new Text Shading layer, and go
into Image > Adjust > Levels one more time (bet you're getting
sick of doing this!).
Pull the levels in like you did with the Displacement Map layer,
so that there is strong black and white contrast.
Next, bring the Text Shading layer's Opacity down to around
50% - depending on how legible you want the text to be.
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11. And we're done! You might want to decrease the final image size,
though, to get rid of any pixellation that results from using the Displacement
filter.
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This effect is especially useful for creating flag-style backgrounds.
Here's one I created for a Russian Teens site:
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