Design a Lightning Text Effect Photoshop Tutorial

hello there you're watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills and grow as a designer in this tutorial we're going to be learning how to create a Lightning text effect in Adobe Photoshop so to start with I've created a new document 1920 pixels wide 1080 pixels high now before we start you're going to want to do a couple of things I'd recommend downloading a very Jaggi sharp edged lightning esque font you can use a different font if you'd like but using something like this will create a better lightening effect so I'll link this in the description it's on a thousand one font calm and it's called fighting spirit also we're going to need some Lightning brushes now you can search these on Google and there are plenty out there the ones I'm going to be using for this tutorial are by ghost fighter on deviantART and I'll also link this below in the description so first go ahead and download the font and then install it as you would normally whether you're on Mac or PC and then if you download the Lightning brushes as well and then what you should get is the dot ABR file and then if you select the brush tool in Photoshop click on this little arrow up here in the top left corner to select your brush and then from the cog in the top right select that and go down to load brushes navigate to the dot ABR file and then select it and it will load the brushes into Photoshop and they will appear at the bottom here ok so once you've got your font sorted and your lightening brushes we are ready to go so let's select black as our foreground color select the fill tool and we'll just add some black in there next we're going to select the text tool left click anywhere on the artboard and you can type your word for this tutorial is going to be lightning and I'm going to make this white and then go to edit down to free transform I'm n hold shift to scale this up I'm going to position this in the center and as you can see I've selected the fighting spirit font and next we're going to go into our layers palette right click on the lightening layer and select blending options now on the blending options screen you'll see fill opacity we're just going to drag that slider from 100% all the way down to zero so your text should disappear next if you select stroke and select the stroke color as a very very light blue so there's a little bit of blue but it's not quite white something like this and then we can thicken this up a little bit and then we can also go to outer glow just select that and we can up the opacity here and adjust the size as you like this is going to give our lightening a little bit of a glow and you can click on the swatch here and adjust the color as well so something like this when you're happy you can click OK now next what we're going to do is we're going to start using our lightening brushes so if we create a new layer and select your brush tool and select white as your foreground color load up your brushes menu by clicking up here on the little arrow and then just pick one of the brushes that you've installed and you can adjust the size here and then just left click anywhere on the artboard now it's added this brush on to this layer so we can turn this on and off we can also go to edit and free transform and we can move this around and we can resize it now the aim of what we're about to do now is we want to try and add the lightening along the lines of the letters so it looks like the letters themselves are electrified so let's try this now with the first letter let's just line this lightning up so that it runs along the edge or the left edge of the L where so when you're happy with your free transform you can double click that now what we can do is we don't need all of the lightning we don't need this bit at the bottom of the glow so we can actually add a mask to this lightning layer select your brush tool again and if you have black selected as your foreground color you will paint into the mask and remove the lightning and you can press X to quickly swap your black and white foreground and background colors and it will paint it back in so it's very easy to switch between black and white and then remove something or add it to your mask now you can select a different brush to do this you can go back up to the top and select a feather brush or you can use the lightening brush or you can use anything you like remember you can adjust the size of your brush very quickly by using these square brackets left and right so they will reduce or increase the size of the brush and with black selected and the mask selected we're just going to paint into this so you can see this soft feather brush tool is quite handy and just removing the bits of lightening that we don't really want and we can paint a few bits back in there so this extends a little bit too far up let's just shorten that so there we go we've sufficiently electrified that left edge so let's create a new layer and let's pick another lightening brush and we're going to repeat this as you can see that's a bit big there so let's just bring the size of that brush down let's try something a little bit different there we go so we can scale this down using edit and then free transform and then rotate you can rotate from the edges and just line this up the edges of your letters double click to set that in place add the layer mask make sure you've got black selected and whichever brush you like either a lightening brush or a soft feather brush at the top that's one of Photoshop defaults and we can just paint into the mask and remove what we don't like once again you can press X to swap the foreground and background color and you can paint this back in if you want swap it over and remove it so it's much much less final than using something like the eraser tool once you erase it it's gone for good whereas this you can paint it back in you can remove it so it gives you a bit more flexibility so we can create a new layer now and use another lightening brush or we can do is just duplicate one of the layers we've created so let's right click this and duplicate layer just click OK to confirm that shortcut for that is command J on the Mac or ctrl J on the PC now when we're duplicating lightening we don't want the lightening to look just like we've copied it and repeated it so what I've done here is I've rotated this 180 degrees so if your lightning that you're using has any very distinctive bits and you copy that and duplicate it five or six times across this one piece of text it will look a little bit copied and pasted so we want to try and create as much original lightening for each letter as possible so these two bits here these last two layers I created they are the same shape just rotated but to look at you wouldn't necessarily notice so let's duplicate that again and go to edit free transform and just move this out and see if we can get away with another one of these just adjust the angle there and we'll just electrify that letter I okay so let's make a new layer let's pick some some different lightning now just so we're not repeating the same Lightning over and over again let's try let's try something else okay possibly this one so again we're just going to shrink this down in size and just line this bit of lightning up here with the left edge of the N add that layer mask go back up and select the feathered brush make sure black is your foreground color and we're just going to remove all of the lightning that we don't need you can have a few bits of lightning coming off if you like and let's duplicate that layer again just see if we can repeat this anywhere else if we can rotate it and get away with using it again so I'm going to use it here again on the other edge of the end however this Fork shape at the bottom these two pieces here are very similar to these even though they're rotated so what I'm going to do is select the layer mask select the brush tool and just remove those it just looks a little bit too similar so I'm using the same piece of lightning which is a different part of it so something like this now let's see if we could select some previously created lightening layers and we can move these out as well possibly rotate them and you can do this as many times as you like you can add as much lightning as you like and as you become familiar with this you'll get very quick and just adding the lightning and tweaking it and masking different pieces of lightning off let's have some going across the top of the tee here now this tee has got a slight curve on it so with this lightening layer selected we can go to edit transform and warp and let's see if we can curve that a little bit so you've got the presets up here so let's just try and arc that and you can adjust the bend here so we're just going to try and curve it a little bit if we can let's try arch now let's go back to arc press enter once you've finished let's see if we can curve that just a little bit just so it sits on that tee a bit close more closely something like that could work and again I'm going to duplicate that layer and then free transform rotate it and possibly use this for part of the G as well and again duplicate and use that again for this G and then in the layer mask itself I'm just going to rub a little bit out and bring a bit more in just so it's a little bit different so the two G's don't look the same even though they you do use the same piece of lightning so like I said you can do this as many times as you like until your text is as electrified as you like once you're happy with that what you can do is right-click on the first text layer we created go to blending options select color overlay and it's remember that light blue color from before you can keep that color or select a new one if you like go to outer glow it's remembered that from before as well it does look a bit odd there so let's just adjust the colors here reduce the spread I think bring that down to zero and then adjust the glow adjust the opacity so we still want to give it a nice subtle glow and you can adjust the different effects if you like you've got some contour effects down here that give you slightly different glow effects I think we're going to stick with these settings here and click OK and then what you can do is right click on that layer go to copy layer style and then hold shift and select your top layer and then right click again and select paste layer style and it will apply that same effect to all of your pieces of lightning that we've added and then we can click the arrow at the end of the layer here just to collapse all of these next what we're going to do is add a background so we can select all of these layers holding shift and then press command G on the Mac or ctrl G on the PC to group these into a layer and we'll just call this group text it just helps us keep everything a lot tidier and then select your background layer and just click the new layer icon in the layers palette make sure that you have black selected as your foreground color and then you can go to filter down to render and just select clouds and it will add some default photoshop clouds in there or you can use a background of your choice and then if you go to layer new adjustment layer and down to hue and saturation just click OK and then tick the colorize box you can then adjust the hue until you get a blue shade similar to your lightening the saturation so how blue do you really want this to look and then you can adjust the lightness and we're going to bring this right down so we want this to be a very subtle background we want to keep the text our focal point here and then right click on that adjustment layer and select create clipping mask and you'll see this little arrow appear on the left so what that does is it means that this adjustment layer I can toggle that on and off but the darkened blue effect will only apply to this layer so let's just call this clouds next what we can do is we can create a new layer and select a foreground color let's select another blue a nice bright blue color and with a nice soft feather brush you can just draw in some blue now you can see that it's positioned it underneath the hue and saturation layer so it's got that arrow we don't want that so what we need to do is just drag this above the hue and saturation layer and there we go we can see that blue color wash that we've added and then we can adjust the position of this if we like I'm actually going to create a new layer and select a darker shade of blue you can see it's got this arrow again so we can right click that we really don't want that to relate to our clouds layer and we can go release clipping mask so these two here the clouds and the hue and saturation layer are separate so we can actually select both of these and just lock those layers we don't want to select them anymore so anyway back to our new layer I've got my darker shade of blue and I'm going to add this over here on the left and then you can play around with this as much as you like so you can select the blending options and you can select overlay or you can select screen lots of other different options and you can adjust the opacity so this is where you can get really really creative what we can also do is if we select our darkest blue layer at the top just create a new layer select the gradient tool and just click up here and select the gradient here that goes from a color through to transparency now if you double click on this left color and select black and click OK and make sure you have radial selected as the type of gradient left click in the center and drag out and let go and it will add this vignette effect around the edge and then again you can apply some effects so I've gone with overlay here you can choose a whole bunch of different effects depending on what you're looking for and you can reduce the opacity again and get as creative as you like so I'm going to add one more layer in here that's above the dark blue one this is going to be a much lighter blue again and I'm going to set the blending mode as screen and just bring that down so we can see it's starting to come together however there's a bit more work that we can do on the actual lettering to make it look more like lightning so if we go into our layers palette and expand our text group right click on your original Lightning text layer go to blending options and we can probably reduce the stroke down in size a little bit so it's a little bit thinner and a bit closer to the lightening that we've added around it we can then go to the outer glow and we could reduce the opacity so it's not as visible just adjust this slightly so there's a bit more focus on the Lightning itself something else we can also do is select above our vignette layer that's layer six here and just make sure that you have black as the fill color and just click to add some black so you can see our lightening effect a lot more now and we can just reduce the opacity of this very slightly so it's a bit darker and again it puts more focus on the lettering and the lining effect itself so let's group all of these background layers into a folder so just select all of them and just click on the folder icon or press commander G on the Mac of ctrl G on the PC and we'll just call this BG and will lock this group so now we can see our lightening lettering we can select the layers and we can do a little bit more work so let's duplicate these again and go back to duplicating and rotating just so they can look a little bit more electrified in places so something like this so I'm just duplicating resizing very slightly and just reusing the same lightning assets that I've already used and you can create new lightning if you like as long as it doesn't look to copy and pasted you should be able to get away with it I think we're going to need a little bit more on the G so let's go and create a new layer select white as our foreground color and then select one of our lightening brushes something with a bit of a curve on it let's try making this one a bit smaller let's see if we can use this to electrify this G so again I'm going to try and line this up with the curve along the top edge of the G or perfect there we go that's brilliant so let's create a new layer mask again select our brush tool we want that soft feathered brush at the top and I'm just going to actually paint out everything and then swap the foreground and the background color and just paint it back in along that edge there this one's got a bit of a glow around it with this brush I'm just going to just cut into that a little bit more so we don't get that glow and then I can right-click on any of the other lightening layers click copy layer style right click on the new layer and select paste layer style and it will add that glow and then I can just duplicate that drag that across for the G at the other end possibly bring the opacity down slightly anything I can do to make it slightly different so it doesn't look like I've copy and pasted it and on this first G here I'm actually going to duplicate that again and just rotate it 180 degrees or so I'm also going to run this along the bottom edge just to create more of a difference between this and the G at the end and I'm going to duplicate it again actually and I will use this on the G at the end but in a slightly different position so I'm going to use this just on the bottom left corner of the G and selecting the mask I'm just going to paint some of this out now let's just select this layer here we'll duplicate that and rotate this around possibly reduce this in size so again we're just going to line it up with that letter and I think the L we just duplicate the first bit of lightning that we created and we'll position this along the bottom of the L and just select the mask and remove a couple of bits there and then possibly one more for the letter N we've got a random bit of something there so let's just select that mask just remove that so there we go we've electrified our text what we can do as well is select the Lightning text layer again and just press command J on the Mac or ctrl J on the PC to duplicate that layer and we can just use the arrow keys to move this to the right a couple of pixels and we can duplicate it again and just rotate it very very slightly maybe bring the opacity down and we'll just remove the effects from it just to thicken up these letters and make it look make sure we keep the stroke on actually just to make it look like there's current coming off them you don't want to move it too far it will make the lettering quite difficult to read if it looks something like this but just enough that it throws it off so duplicate very slight rotation adjust the opacity if you like and it just helps make the text look a little bit more randomized and one other thing we can look at doing is if we go back into our layers palette and if we right click on our text layers and click convert to smart object and then we can mess around with some of the blending modes a little bit more usually it won't let you apply a blending mode to something that already has blending options so just be mindful of that so again let's right-click some of the other text layers and just try some different blending options using things like screen overlay and soft light or what I'm using a lot in this tutorial so feel free to experiment with some of the different effects so right click convert to smart object and it will then let us apply those blending options we can try a few different ones I think hard light and you can adjust the opacity or you could select all of them and hit duplicate to strengthen them all up and we can actually select the lightening layers above by holding shift let's just use that arrow on the right to collapse these and I can select group and I'm going to call this group lightening and just move that to the top so just drag that above the text group and then we can duplicate this group and you'll see that it intensifies the lightening effect you can also duplicate that group again and again and you can do this as many times as you like and it will amplify that lightening effect and what we can actually do is select these last four that we've duplicated right click go to convert to smart object apply a layer mask to that so you can toggle this on and off now and then we can paint into this with another lightening brush so make sure you have black selected as your foreground color and we can actually paint into this so we're removing a lot of the lightning but kind of leaving little pieces and then you can switch that round so the fill is white and just apply some more we're just going to bring the intensity down on a couple of points so there's a couple of parts of the lightning that are very intense let's just bring this down a little bit so you kind of get these shards all around the edge which are quite nice these like fragments of lightning and this may take a little bit of a little bit of playing around just brushing into that mask then brushing out of it using different brushes or the feather brush or the lightening brushes like so and it's also a good way to just add a few more bits of lightning so we added a lot of lightning in this tutorial manually this is a good way to just get lots of little bits of lightning around the edge and you can make the brush a lot smaller if you like and then there's a couple of places I think I'm missing some Lightning altogether so we can go back in and we can just complete these so at the moment the H looks a bit out of place it's a little bit barren so again I'm just duplicating the Lightning rotating it and then lining up with the edges of the letters and with something like this it all becomes so chaotic that it's actually quite hard to see which pieces of lightning have been duplicated and which haven't which is great because it means that we can reuse the Lightning rather than doing every single letter individually so once you're happy with your lightning there we go just a few fragments there and we've also got these extra little fragments around the edge as well so these are where we've used the Lightning brush and then we've masks it out but actually quite like these they look like little little tour details little shards of Lightning that just kind of escaped in the background so I'm going to leave those there let's just bring this top layer inside our Lightning layer then we can collapse that and we have our layers all neatly tucked away so we can turn our lightning off and then turn it back on and there we go we've created an awesome Lightning text effect in Adobe Photoshop as always guys please feel free to leave any questions or comments down below like this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time

Channel: Dansky

Views: 505,827

Keywords: photoshop cs6 tutorial, adobe, adobe photoshop, photoshop tutorial for beginners, designs, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, photoshop cs6, tutorial, tutorial photoshop, photoshop tutorial cs6, text effect, text, effect, text effect tutorial, photoshop text effect, text effect photoshop, text effect photoshop tutorial, text effect tutorial photoshop, lightning text effect, lightning effect photoshop, lightning text tutorial

Id: lrq8ii4Cc2U

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2016