As promised dear readers here is another Photoshop tutorial from yours truly. I am well into my end-of-year holiday period (still seven days to go!). And as promised, I wanted to up my game a little on this blog with Adobe tutorials. So I’ve done a whole heap of them some of which I’ll be writing about here for anyone with an interest in creating art with Adobe software.

My last review was on the Adobe Photoshop In-app tutorial for working with layers. Today I have a an exercise with type which I haven’t done in a long while. One of my friends let me borrow this manual so I decided to do one of the exercises from it for today’s post.

Here’s a little bit of a preview of what we’ll be making:

Using Transparency from Blend

Blend modes are a great thing to use for making your creations stand out. You can use blend modes to alter the appearance of something simply by changing the transparency.

That is what we will be doing in today’s tutorial. Don’t worry if you’re not used to using blend modes. As long as you have a basic understanding of layers and you are relatively well-versed in how to use the layer’s panel, you should be fine.

The first thing we need to do is to open our grungy peeled paint image in Photoshop. Once you’ve done that, you will then need to create a new layer for your text (or simply type on the grunge layer if you want). This will create a layer for your text.

For the text please type the letters ‘P’ and ‘s’ as shown in the example above. Change the colour to blue 026fc2. The font should be something that is going to look good bold and big enough to stand out. I used Alte Haas Grotesk with a size of 150 (but you can change these if you wish).

Next we will move to the layers panel where we need to make sure the background layer is not locked. If it is, please click on the padlock to unlock this layer. That way we can move the layers around so that our grunge layer is above our text.

Now we need to focus on the layer panel so we can adjust our text using blend modes. To do this, make sure you have the grunge layer highlighted. Then double click on that layer in the panel to open up the blend modes. Here you will see an array of different settings. Don’t feel overwhelmed, we are only going to focus on “Blend if” settings.

Look down at the “Blend If” settings as per the image above. You will need to push the white slider from where it says “this layer” all they way left to ‘0’. This is so that the light parts of the image give way to the darker parts which we need for our text effect.

Right click the layer and choose “Convert To Smart Object”. Now right click the layer again and choose “Select Pixels” from the drop down menu. This should then select all of the dark cracks in the image so we can manipulate this part of the image.

Next you will need to change the scale of this layer so that you can add as many cracks to your text as possible. Use the transform tool to do this.

Now we only want to add this effect to the text and nothing else so we need to right click again and choose “Create Clipping Mask”. You can also press the “CTRL” key in Windows (CMD on a Mac) and click with your mouse between the layers which does the same thing.

Finally let’s add our final adjustments to the image by highlighting our text layer and right clicking so that the blending layer panel opens up again. Here you can experiment with any of the options you like. I kept things simple with a little “Bevel and Emboss” on the text. My settings are in the image above.

And THAT is it! If you got the end, WELL done friend! If you followed the steps above, your final image should look something like this:

Final Summary:

Website: No website available.

There is an asset file for this tutorial which you can download here.

Tutor: BDM Publications

Time: For brand new Photoshop artists, probably around 5 minutes.

Level: Beginner

Assets included: Yes but no PSD.

Rating: 8/10 👍 I enjoyed making this tutorial review and following along to the tutorial. The text was easy to follow and clear with no missing steps. It’s perfect for a beginner looking to learn about transparency and blend modes.

Thanks for reading and supporting me. Catch you in my next post, friends – stay safe out there and keep creating!

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