Create a Glowing Neon Text Effect in Photoshop

hey guys you're watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills in this tutorial we're going to learn how to create an awesome neon text effect all in photoshop righty-o so we're now in Photoshop and I've started by creating a new document that is 1920 by 1080 pixels and I've set the color mode to RGB and I'm actually going to be working on a black background to start with because we're creating some neon text and it's going to stand out look a lot more vibrant off of a darker background so just make sure you've got black for another dark color selected in the color picker and just grab that paint bucket tool and just left click anywhere on the canvas now we have black next we're going to select our type tool and just left click anywhere on the canvas and we'll type a word now this can be any word you like I'm going to use the word flicks and just select that text and you can change the properties at the top so I'm going to change the color to white and we could increase the size from here change the font I'm using josephine sans bold italic or you can also go to edit free transform and hold shift and alt on the keyboard and scale up from the center so that's another way to quickly and easily scale text if you don't want to go through the character properties at the top and of course we'll make sure this is as central as we possibly can on the canvas and I'm going to right click and select duplicate click OK and I'm actually going to switch off this original flix text layer just so I have a copy of that text that is still editable just in case I need to reference it or maybe create copies of from it in future so it's kind of like a backup so we have our flix copy and we can right-click this and go to blending options and select gradient overlay and just click anywhere on the gradient slider I'll try and move this out of the way so you can see what I'm doing and it will bring up this gradient editor now I've already created the gradient here so I'm just going to click this if you'd like to use the exact same gradient that I'm using so it goes from an orange to a pink to a purple to it blue to a green I'll add a link in the video description where you can go and download that gradient file we have to do is just go to load navigate to the gradient file linked in the description and it will load that in here so there are the colors or you can go ahead and create this yourself so we'll click ok this is our gradient and I want this to run from left to right so I'm going to change the angle and we're going to go zero and you can reverse it if you'd like it to go the other way but I'm going to keep it so it runs from orange all the way through to the green like this and click OK next I'm going to duplicate this layer again and just switch off that previous layer and again right click and select blending options and this time I'm going to deselect gradient overlay and from the main blending options screen I'm actually going to drag the fill opacity all the way to zero and you can see it completely disappears but then I can select stroke and I could change the fill type to gradient and you guessed it we're going to do the same thing again click the gradient slider select that same gradient change the angle to zero so it runs from left to right or from right to left just essentially mirror what you did in the previous step and you can choose where it aligns to whether it's the inside or the outside of the center I think I'm gonna keep this set to center for this tutorial and you can adjust the size as well so we don't want it too thin but we don't want it too thick as well so I think I might go for about let's go for 30 and see how we go now the great thing about creating these kind of text effects and doing tutorials just like this is that every time I do this every time I rehearse this tutorial I always get a slightly different effect so at the moment we have our text and we have it as a fill and we have the same thing as a stroke so what we're going to do next is I'm actually going to right click on this layer and duplicate this and then I'm going to go to filter blur and motion blur and it will ask me if I want to rasterize or convert this to a smart object we want to convert it to a smart object and the reason that we want to do that is because when it finishes loading we can apply our blur and we can have this going in all manner of different angles I think I'll keep this at 0 so it runs from left to right and I can adjust the distance here so you can see I can bring this all the way up really high and click OK but the reason that I like to have this is a smart object is because any filters I add up here are listed as smart filters and I can double click them go and edit them I can drag them to the trash and delete them so you get a lot more flexibility and I can double click on the thumbnail of that smart object and I've still got this layer inside here with all of those different blending options so I can actually go back in and edit them any changes that I make I just need to save when I close this down and it will update those in the main document so let's right-click and duplicate that awesome motion blur layer again and as I mentioned you can edit it so I'm going to double click on the motion blur text and it brings up that dialog box again I'm going to change the angle this time nothing specific we'll just go for 60 so it's on a bit of a diagonal and maybe maybe have it just not as crazy as it was before in the distance we'll bring it down a little bit and click OK and then I can hold shift and select both of these layers and I could even bring down the opacity a little bit so I'll bring that down to about 80% just so it's a tiny bit more subtle now at the moment we have a lot of flicks copy layers going on and this is going to get really confusing further on in the video so I think I'm gonna start naming this so I'm gonna call this flicks fill and then flicks stroke so you can just double click on the text of your layer and give it a name so I'll call this motion blur ha for horizontal and their motion blur bang for angle and we can collapse these down as well we don't need to see those motion blur effects so it just helps keeping your layers nice and organized and a bit more tidy okay what else can we do well we can actually grab the stroke layer here again right click this and select duplicate layer click OK drag this to the top and I can double click on the layer name and just call this highlight and what I need to do is go to blending options just stroke and I'll move this out the way and we'll set the I think we'll set the gradient type to this one here so it's one of the default gradients and it's black going to transparency except when we click that we want to actually change the black swatch to white so you can double click on this black swatch and drag it up to white in the top left corner so now we have white running to transparency and we actually want this to run from the top to the bottom so we'll change that angle back to 90 and that's the wrong way around so we can click reverse or enter minus 90 in there is entirely up to you and we now have a highlight on our text we can adjust the size if we want but of course it is going to conflict with what we've already set so it's probably best we just leave that highlight the same you could have it a bit smaller I suppose and it would be slightly inset but I think I'll keep it the same and you can drag the white here on the gradient slider as well if you'd like the white to cover more of your text and then when you're happy just click OK and what we could do is we can change the blending mode let's have a look if we zoom in so we'll change the blending mode now when you have blending options applied blending modes tend to not work in a lot of cases so the one way we can get around this is again right click this layer and convert it to a smart object and Photoshop will do its thing now we can still double click that go inside we've got all of those options there we can save and close if we need to make any changes but now that this is a smart object we can actually start applying blending modes so you can see I change that to an overlay there and that white beautifully blends into the rest of the image so it adds a really really nice highlight so now we can switch back on our flicks fill and I'm going to duplicate this and then switch it back off just in case I need it again and I'm going to let's try applying motion blur to this now and we again convert to smart object so as I mentioned at the beginning I have a reference image in front of me for what we're going to be creating but how I'm going to get there is just something that always varies and it makes it quite fun actually so we'll just we'll crank this up we can mess around with the angle we could even try and mirror so you can see here I'm trying to mirror the angle what was it 60 I think so yeah we'll go for that same angle and click okay so our text is getting pretty crazy now and we can just bring that our pasty down so it's a lot more subtle so we'll go for 40% and I'll just call this layer flicks fill blur just so everything's nice and organized we could even try applying a Gaussian blur on top of that the thing that's really gonna do too much nope that's fine we'll leave that off we'll keep it just as the motion blur and something else that we're going to do is select flick stroke again and I'm going to right click this duplicate this layer and then we'll right-click and select blending options and from the stroke panel I'm going to change the width to half so we'll go with 15 and then press return or click OK and then I'm actually going to use the arrow keys just to move this out and I'm actually going to drag this underneath as well and just change this to flicks stroke and I'll call it thin and then drop that opacity down to something like let's go for 15 see how that looks and we can even move this around up or down as well it doesn't have to just be left or right I might drop that down to 10% on the opacity so lots of just experimentation here fiddling around basically just have fun just have a ton of fun doing this I love doing this and we can even duplicate that layer and do another version so we'll right-click and select blending options and we'll change that stroke again we'll drop it down to let's go for eight we'll try and keep sort of roughly half it and I think for that one maybe I'll apply a Gaussian blur so like a really subtle blur I'll just zoom in a bit so you can see what I'm doing so that's the really really thin one so I'm just applying let's go for five pixels of blur and we could even do that or do something similar to the other one the 15 pixel one so we'll just apply that Gaussian blur convert to smart object which is taking forever on my really old laptop and we'll change that to three so it's not got as much blur so the really thin line is a bit more blurred than that one and they're all offset no particular order nice and random it just keeps it looking interesting let me can then go back to our flicks stroke remember this is our original layer we started with and we could even drop the opacity down on that so if we start to bring this down you can see all the layers that we've got here all the different strokes and lines and everything else they just all start to really nicely blend into one another and we could switch on our flicks fill if we wanted and we could even drop that down to 5% so you can see it just adds a bit more oomph to that fill and I think something else I'm going to do is just add a new layer now this is going to be right at the bottom and I'm going to call this gradient background like it's about background correctly grab that gradient tool and just click the slider up here and of course we still have that gradient that we used at the beginning then make sure you have linear gradient selected that's the one on the left just do a test just drag from the left to the right great is running in the right direction if it's not if you're doing it the other way around just drag from right to left so what I'm going to do is just left-click hold shift and drag from the left edge to the right edge and it will apply that gradient to the gradient background layer and now what I can do is bring me up pasty down in fact what that does is that runs the gradient across the entire layer let's do that again what I really want is to add a bit of a glow to the background but one that relates to the text so instead of going from the very left edge to the very right edge I want this to line up a little bit more with my text so I'm actually going to start my gradient about here and end it about here let's try that again maybe bring it in a bit more there we go so you can see that the orange part of my text lines up a lot more with the orange part of the background so if I then bring this down let's go really low we'll go for about five percent I think it's really subtle but the orange lettering here lines up with that orange part of the gradient the pink lettering and so on and you can keep doing that gradient over and over again but the reason I want this to be low and really subtle is just so some of this color is coming off onto the background so we'll just change this second version here to gradient background and the first one we did that went all the way from the left edge to the right edge we'll drag that to the trash we don't need that anymore so a little bit of experimentation and in fact I'm going to create a new layer another one drag this up and I'm going to call this gradient ellipse and just grab the elliptical marquee tool I always struggle to say the word elliptical for some reason but I'm doing pretty well today and I'm going to feather this so we'll try 100 pixels for now with feathering sometimes it's worth just experimenting so I can just drag to create something like this around the text we're going to add a bit of a glow to the background and just grab the paint bucket tool and you can just you can see by testing how the feathering looks we'll go to edit undo and maybe just bump up that feathering to 200 so that really depends on the size of your document and the amount of feathering that you'd like so we'll grab the gradient tool again under the paint bucket tool left-click and drag to the right in fact I'll bring that in a bit more just so we're matching our text again and we have something like this and we can actually well first of all let's right-click this and make it a smart object remember so what I was going to do then was add the gradient add the Gaussian blur directly to that layer but that would make it permanent and now as a smart object I can go in add this blur and it will blur this we could go all the way like there we go that's more like it but because this is a smart object now what it will do is it will list this underneath and I can go back in and edit that if I really want to know who's gonna bring that all the way down and then bring it up but ever so slightly so maybe we'll go for about 12 percent maybe 10 so those two layers really just take it from a black background we add a very subtle gradient across the entire canvas but then we had this one here which is a bit more of a blur around the text as well and I'm gonna go in now and just add a few more little refinements so we have the highlight layer here and I'm actually just going to duplicate this one and then change the blending mode back to normal and then double click to go inside that because it is a smart object this one and then change the blending options and adjust that stroke will go for 15 save and close it goes back to the main document and then what I'm going to do is leave the blending mode set to normal bring the opacity down a little bit and what that has done as well is because it's a smart object and i duplicated it once they edited it it did update the other version as well but that's fine I quite like the way this works it just adds that kind of inset sort of effect so we have the glow running down the middle so one of those is set to overlay which is this one here so that's the overlay one and then we have another highlight layer on top that is set to normal and it just kind of really helps bring that out so I'll just leave those both called highlight for now and the last thing I'm going to do is actually just give this whole thing a bit more oomph so from the bottom of the layers panel we'll click the adjustment icon and I'm going to go to brightness and contrast and what we're going to do is increase the brightness so this becomes a lot more vibrant and increase the contrast as well so let's see how far we can go now of course doing this will apply an adjustment layer at the very top of your layers panel so it may affect other layers below it but you can see the difference here from applying that layer we've gone from something quite dark and a bit dull to actually quite vibrant and a bit crazy and because it does that it is affecting the gradient layers as well so I think I might even tone these down to something like 2% let's drag in yeah we'll go for 2% on this one and we'll go for 8% on that one so I'm going to leave the adjustment layer here the brightness and contrast one at the very top just so I can see this preview and in fact I think I'm going to add another adjustment layer which is a solid color and I'm actually going to change the background color so at the beginning we started with a black black black real black I'm gonna go for a very very very dark blue instead and then just double click on that thumbnail and bring that down so there we go you can see the difference instead of black we have a very dark blue I'm actually going to select the background layer hit delete or backspace and rename this one background you've been replaced and just lock this layer here just so it doesn't move by mistake or anything and I'm just going to make some last-minute final changes I'm just going to figure out which layers which and maybe just start bringing down the blur so I'm just changing that a pasty to 20 percent I've got the flicks stroke layer so I'm going to bring that down even more so a good for 30% on this and please when you're when you're following this tutorial this is really about teaching you these tips and techniques that you can use to enhance your text please feel free to go crazy experiment go wild this is what I'm doing here I'm just kind of literally filling around with what I've created and it's just a case of finding the right layer so we've got these blurs here so I think I'm actually going to change that one so I can double click the smart object again and I'm actually going to make thinner so I'm going to go for 15 here as well close and save and it will update those smart object changes in your main document here we go so a little bit more thinner a little bit more thinner I think that's terrible English but never mind never mind and well maybe duplicate this one again and just give this more offset so I'm just basically building up lots and lots of layers on top of each other to really try and create a lot of variety in the text and these little kind of these subtle accents all of these lines these different things these blurs their little details but when you add all these layers up you can see that it actually creates a much more effective end result let me just switch this one off and on so I'm going to duplicate this one again as well and then change the emotion blur on the one below we're going to make that even crazier but I'm going to drop the opacity on that one to ten so instead of one motion blur we're going to have two one two and I could spend hours upon hours messing around with this but I think I'm probably going to leave it there the only last thing but I am going to do is add some noise to the background so what I can do is I can create a new layer just above the background and just fill this with black and go to filter noise add noise and change the amount this will vary depending on your documents size so let's just increase this slowly we can see how it will look so we have a 3% monochromatic Gaussian okay now this is purely optional I just like this because it just adds a little bit of noise a little bit of texture to the background and you can change the blending mode to something like overlay if you want to or you can just drop the opacity and keep the blending mode as normal so we could drop this down to around let's say 40% so it's really really subtle we'll just call that noise but it's just one of those tiny little details that I think and can really add up to a much more effective design at the end as you can see it has made it a lot blacker now so that's why sometimes using blending modes like overlay for noise can be quite useful even though it seems to have made it in darker there let's try inverting it there we go that seems to work so if I select my noise layer and just go image adjustments invert and increase capacity there oftentimes it's just a case of really experimenting with it it's completely white now let's forget let's forget I did that that's forget I did that we'll go back to having the noise here before I before I messed this up so there we go subtle noise on our noise layer and we still get some of that blue coming through on the background if we add a noise layer what we can do is just unlock our background double click on that color and just bring a bit more blue back in so adding the noise on the black layer darkened it we can just counter that by bringing up the blue color on our background layer and then just re lock that again and we're done now so I don't need this flicks there anymore so let's just turn everything off and have a look what we've done so we started with a black background which of course is now a very very very dark blue we've added some noise we've added the subtle gradients around the text and on the background and if I just switch these layers on you can see lots and lots of subtle individual layers but when you actually add them all up especially with the brightness and contrast one on top it actually all adds up to a much more impactful overall design there we go that's how to create an awesome neon text effects in Photoshop as always guys please feel free to leave any questions or comments down below a huge super massive thank you to the people who support me on patreon thank you so much if you'd like to become a patron or find out more information there is a link in there descripcion as always thank you so much for watching like this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 150,583

Keywords: neon photoshop, neon text photoshop, neon text effect in photoshop, neon text effect tutorial, photoshop neon effect, photoshop neon text effect, neon text effect, neon text photoshop tutorial, neon effect photoshop, neon effect photoshop tutorial, text effect, neon photoshop tutorial, neon text photoshop cc, neon effect photoshop cc, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, photoshop, glowing text effect, glowing text in photoshop, glowing text tutorial, glow photoshop tutorial, glowing

Id: ctVMnwOOSSQ

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018