The World Through My Eyes

So you’ve had Adobe Photoshop for a while and your effects library consists of cool grungy stuff, immaculate reflections and you’ve just about mastered the air brush. Great, but you could be doing so much more useful stuff! Messing around is great initially, you learn a lot of new techniques - but isn’t it about time you learnt something you could really use?

This tutorial details how to use effects and techniques you’ve learnt in real life scenarios - in this tutorial we’ll look at creating birthday/greeting card text effects in Adobe Photoshop.

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Fancy Lettering

1. The ‘Dear Bob’ effect - Select any font, I’ve used Georgia 36pt - with this effect there aren’t any font restrictions - it will work with most fonts. Once you’ve selected your font, apply the following effects to the Layer (This is done by right-clicking the text layer and selecting ‘Blending Options…’). The effects used are Drop Shadow and Outer Glow.

Drop Shadow Effect
Outer Glow Effect

2. Next up, we’ll look at the ‘Thanks’ lettering. These are great to use in almost any context - the effect produced is informal, colourful text. The font used is Arial Black 72pt - the effect works best with thick-lettering, you may also want to try it using Eras Bold ITC or Goudy Stout. Effects used this time are Drop Shadow, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Drop Shadow Effect
Gradient Overlay
Stroke

Just a quick note about the ‘Gradient Overlay’ effect - Keep the colours bright and flourescenty! Experiment with different colours - generally a darker shade of the colour to a lighter shade of the colour works really well.

3. Finally, we have the bevelled ‘Happy Birthday’ text effect. The font used here was Gill Sans Ultra Bold 76pt. The font face doesn’t matter so much but the bigger the font size, the nicer this effect usually turns out - let your mind run free with different fonts here until you find the one you feel is most appropriate. The effects used this time are Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Drop Shadow Effect
Inner Shadow Effect
Bevel and Emboss Effect
Gradient Overlay
Stroke

So that’s just about it.

These effects have a huge range of applications and I’d strongly advise you don’t follow this tutorial exactly ‘as is’ - try twiddling around and see what you get.

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