Neon Text Effect Photoshop Tutorial

[Music] 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 learn how to create a neon text effect in Adobe Photoshop so to start with I've created a new document 1920 wide and 1080 high and I've selected black as the background color I've also opened up some images in Photoshop so we've got a grunge texture some bricks and some kind of grain splatter effect so we will be using these later in the tutorial you don't have to use these exact images but you'll see how we can use them a little bit later on so back to our main document we've got our artboard and our black color and what we're going to do is select the type tool left click anywhere and type our word so for this tutorial I'm going to be using the word neon of course and then just select that text and pick any font that you like this does work with any font but for this tutorial I'm going to be using the font Lavelle o-line and we can use bold or light let's see how bold looks and then we can change the color of that from a color picker at the top so let's just go to white and I might just go to the light version I think yes let's go for that okay so that's all good so we've got the text in the middle of the page hopefully in the middle we can double click our background layer give this a name and click OK and what I can do now is just drag over both the background and the text and just align these from the alignment options at the top just to make sure that this text is central on the page with that background layer selected you can just lock that again so we've got our text on the background the first thing we're going to do is right-click on the text layer and select blending options and this brings up this dialogue box let's just move this to one side now if you tick out a glow towards the bottom and then you can pick a color from the color picker so we're going to go for a blue light blue I think something nice and vibrant and you can't see it at the moment so let's just click OK to select that color and we can change the blend mode from screen to normal and let's just bring that up acity up and you'll see it start to come through you can leave the blending mode set its screen actually because we're working against the black background so it will still stand out now what we can do is we've adjusted the opacity we can also increase the spread to think of this how harsh or thick this is around the edge and the size is obviously the size it will make it huge or you can make it really really small so if you want to go for a more defined glow around the edge increase the spread and keep the size fairly low or you can bring the spread down and it will soften that glow so it's a lot softer and we can bring the size up you'll see it's very blurred very soft and as we bring that size down it's very subtle very subtle glow around the edge so I think to start with will do something like this we'll go for a soft as the technique and we'll keep the spread set at zero and the size at 10 and click OK next what we're going to do is right-click on the neon layer and select duplicate and click OK if we just switch off that top one now the one below what we're going to do is we're going to right click and select blending options and what we're going to do is select the outer glow again and we're going to increase this a little bit more so we're just going to bring the size up a little bit more and maybe bring a spread up ever so slightly as well we're going to leave the opacity set at 100 because we can change that from the layers panel now we don't want to have the white part of the lettering duplicated so if we go back to the main blending options screen what we can do is drag the fill opacity all the way to the left and it will remove the actual letters themselves so now we've got this enhanced glow and then we have our text with a very subtle glow on the top layer so we can combine those together and they look something like this now this larger glow is a little bit big I'm just going to double click on the text and just rename that large glow just so I don't get mixed up but we can bring the opacity on that down so we've got a bit of flexibility now we can adjust this very easily from the top right corner of the layers panel now we don't want to adjust the opacity of this one because this will affect the whole layer and it will reduce the opacity of our text which we don't want to do so we can see our neon text starting to come together something else we can also do is select the background layer and from the bottom of the layers panel click new layer and if we zoom in nice and close we can use the eyedropper tool to sample that same blue color and then we'll select the brush tool and we're going to pick one of photoshop's default feathered brushes if I just load the default brushes so we can go reset brushes I've got some custom ones loaded here and just click OK there we go photo shops default brushes so one of these soft feathered ones a hardness of 0 so it looks something like that which is great now we can quickly increase or decrease the brush size by pressing the left and right square brackets on the keyboard so let's just bring this up and what I'm going to do just bring this up nice and big and I'm just going to single left click in the middle of the screen so there we go a nice soft feathered glow perfect and again you can adjust the opacity of this as you like we're going to keep this it around I think let's try 40 percent so really subtle but we can see how they glow from the neon text is affecting the background next what we're going to do is work on our letters a bit more so I'm going to duplicate this top neon layer so that is right-clicking and duplicate or you can press command or control J that's the shortcut key now let's just switch off our other text layers now this duplicate here I'm going to right click and select convert to smart object I don't need to change what the words say or the font anymore but I'm going to keep a backup copy here so let's just rename this layer backup this is just a version of the text where everything is still editable should I need it so we've got an neon copy and at the moment this is looking a little bit a little bit harsh a little bit too defined so I'm going to go to filter down to blur and you can use blur blur Moore or Gaussian blur here and I'm just going to give this a very subtle blur I don't want it to look blurred I just want to soften those edges very slightly so that's how it looked before and this is how it looks now so there we go we've got that piece of text we can bring back in our large glow layer will leave this original editable text layer switched off in fact what we can do is this is a backup layer so we can move this underneath our background just so it's out of the way so now let's go and try and bring in some of these backgrounds we've got we've got this grunge effect here we've got the bricks and we've got this sort of splatter effect as well so let's go and bring the bricks in first so you can get to select all that's command or control a and it will select everything on the canvas or the art board and then go to edit and copy switch back over to your main Photoshop document and then what we're going to do above our glow layer let's just call this soft glow we're just going to press command or control V or go to edit and paste and it will paste it in at bricks now this is a high-res image so it's quite big so I'm going to zoom out and then go to edit free transform hold shift and scale that down I'm not going to scale it down too much because it will look like this neon sign is absolutely huge against the tiny bricks so I think we'll go for let's have a look we don't want the neon sign to appear too small so let's give us something like this and then you can adjust the crop as you like right so we've got the bricks in there and you can start by trying some blending modes so we've got normal at the moment let's set that to soft light and you'll see it does a pretty good job of just blending that into the image we've got at the moment and we've also got this blue soft glow so that's what's allowing the bricks to be displayed with this kind of overlay or soft light effect so this can be a lot of fun just experimenting I think let's go for a soft light what we can also do is we can click on the adjustments layer from the bottom of the layers panel and select hue and saturation drag the saturation all the way to the left so we're taking out the color of the bricks and then right click and select create clipping mask and what it will do is it will apply this adjustment layer only to the layer below so it's only going to affect our bricks layer so you can see here we have the blue soft glow and the bricks merging together the two different colors and we get this kind of greeny effect and we don't really want that so by taking the color out of the bricks it then gives us effectively some desaturated gray looking bricks and then we have that blue coming through and we can select the bricks layer and bring down the opacity so we can just keep bringing that down as much or as little as we like next what we're going to do is select the bricks and I'm going to blur them ever so slightly by going to filter blur and Gaussian blur and let's just adjust that blur I want the focus to be on the lettering so the bricks are ever so slightly out of focus not too much because it will just look completely fake and click okay and I'm going to bring in some of these grunge effects as well so again we're going to go to select all edit copy back over to our main document and make sure it's above the hue and saturation layer and then go to edit and paste and again just go to edit free transform and resize so it covers the entire canvas or artboard and then we can start playing around with this so again you can use the blending modes to blend this into the existing images that we've got and adjust the opacity so we can go back and adjust the opacity of the bricks if we like make them more or less pronounced so lots and lots of tweaking as we get the different elements add it to the document we can add the grain as well just for fun select all edit copy back to the main document select the layer that you want to paste it above so we'll select our grunge layer and go to edit paste and then just use free transform just to fit this to the artboard and then we'll try one of these blending modes depending what you're blending into different blending modes will work for different situations so let's go for overlay for this this is the grain effect okay that doesn't really do anything for the image for me so I'm just going to delete this one altogether actually I think between grunge and bricks we've got a pretty good combination something else that we need to do is we need to create some kind of shadow to give the image a bit of depth and make it look like the neon text isn't flat pressed against the wall so there's going to be a shadow so what we can do to create this is select an neon text back up what we have at the bottom and right click and duplicate layer click OK and we'll bring this up and we'll bring this above all of our background textures but below our text itself and we can switch that on and just drag a fill down to 0 just so we don't have anything going on there and we don't need the outer glow for this one so we can right click the layer and select clear layer style this is just going to be a shadow so let's just bring that fill down again make sure that's totally off and then if I switch my text back on and right-click our shadow layer or what will be our shadow layer and go blending options we can select drop shadow let's bring the opacity all the way up to 100 and you can see it's added a drop shadow to our text now we can adjust the angle of this so we can change the angle of the shadow so we're going to have a something let's go around 140 a little bit less 130 okay looks good to the distance here as we adjust this it will make the shadow further away from the lettering so it will give the illusion that our text is further off the wall now whilst it is a little bit off the wall it's not flat against the wall we don't want it to be too far away now the spread behaves very similarly as we've seen with the outer glow so it will make it either much more defined or a lot softer so we'll bring it up a little bit but not too much and the size again is how big this drop shadows actually going to be so if we make it too big it just becomes a big blur and we lose it in the background so we're going to keep this fairly low just bring it up a little bit and we can go and adjust the opacity if we need to or we can do that from the layers panel it doesn't really matter so we'll do it we'll do it from here 70 percent on the opacity let's click OK and we can see our shadow let's just change the name of this to text shadow just so we don't get confused so that's what it looks like so this was our text before and now this is how it looks with that shadow added so it's just giving it a little bit more realism and it just brings it slightly off the wall now what we can also do is just kind of add a little bit more glow give the text a bit more vibrancy and we can turn on our large glow layer and it just brings back some of that vibrance and we can adjust this and I think one last thing I'm going to do is just try and enhance it a little bit more so we've got the text layer at the top here and we've got the large glow I'm just going to right click and duplicate that large glow layer and right click and select blending options just bring your pasty up to 100% and let's go to outer glow and just try and give this a different color see how that works maybe ever so slightly different there we go so it's really vibrant and let's just let's play around with the contour see if we can get any crazy effects going on so you can see by adjusting the contour you get lots of different weird and wonderful effects I think we'll go back to the original one actually and we can increase the spread we can bring me a pasty down just trying to get a little bit more of a glow let's go for something like this we'll click okay and then we'll change the blending mode ah so if you've applied blending options blending modes don't actually have any effect so what we're going to need to do is right click on our text layer go convert to smart object then we can apply a blending mode now this blue does look a bit strange I've change the hue of the blue it looks a little bit odd so what can do is double click on that smart object and I go back in and I've got my editable text and I can just right click select blending options and go to outer glow and just go to the color picker and pick the correct color there we go shame on me for changing the blue now this is just a temporary smart object so if I just click the X at the top you'll say do I want to save the changes click Save and it will update those smart object changes in the main document so there we go that's how it looked before and we've just enhanced that glow and I could just bring that down ever so slightly but it just gives it a little bit more punch a little bit more color and vibrancy to help bring it off of the wall now something else I'm actually going to do is go to the bricks layer and just zoom back out and go to edit free transform and just bring these down the smaller the bricks are the larger the neon text will appear so there we go and neon text is now considerably bigger in proportion to the size of the bricks and there we go we've created a neon text effect in Adobe Photoshop as always guys please feel free to leave any questions or comments below like this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time you [Music]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 204,079

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, how to create neon effect in photoshop, neon effect photoshop, how to create neon effect, neon effect photoshop tutorial, text effect, neon photoshop tutorial, neon text photoshop cc, neon text photoshop cs6, neon effect photoshop cc, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, photoshop, adobe

Id: czJYkWCec18

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2017