Photoshop Tutorials - Light Painting Text Effect

[Music] hey guys today I'll be teaching you how to create this light painting effect in Adobe Photoshop if you're not familiar with light painting the idea is basically to use a light source to paint lines or words in a dark environment and then capture the process and long exposure using either a DSLR camera or even a smartphone you can find loads of light painting tutorials on YouTube so you should definitely try it out if you have a chance it's really fun but it does require a basic setup and you have very minimal control on your shapes since it's all done in real time so it can get a bit tricky when working on a lettering piece or anything that requires a bit more precision now I'll show you a way to simulate this effect in Photoshop giving you a lot more control so that you can use it for your custom text or lettering work now before we start I just want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video I personally use Squarespace to create and host my websites and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get a website or an online portfolio make sure you stick around to get 10% off your first Squarespace order alright so we're gonna start by creating a new Photoshop document we'll make it three thousand by three thousand pixels you can set the resolution to 72 pixels per inch and use RGB for the color mode and then set the background color to black now that our document is all set up let's go ahead and start creating our text you could just use a script font and add the lighting effects but I want to go a step further and trace the text manually using the pen tool this will allow us to create these streamlines which help simulate a continuous flow and add some realism if you're not familiar with the pen tool I suggest watching my beginners guide video which should bring you up to speed I cover all the basics of the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator but all the same principles apply to photoshop as well I'll leave a link to the guide in the video description all right now I'm just gonna type in the text I want to write to use as a guide in the background so I can trace over it later I'm gonna use a free font called great day but you can use any script font you like I'll leave a download link for this font in the video description so I'm gonna type in the word nice I'm just using a short word for the sake of this video make sure your text color is set to white or something that stands out on a dark background next I'm gonna make it bigger so I'll bring up the free transform tool by hitting command T or ctrl T on PC and then holding down shift I'll drag one of these corners out then I'm just gonna Center the text using these smart guides and I'll bring the opacity down to 5% so that it's just barely visible now we can use this as a guide and start tracing so I'll bring up the pen tool by pressing P and I'll start tracing my path so I'm gonna start tracing this n up here and then loosely follow the shape now you don't have to trace the letters exactly the way they are in your guide it's basically there to help you out with the proportions and the composition but that's about it I try to keep my handles perfectly horizontal for the most part by holding down shift when dragging the handles this helps with the consistency throughout the letters if you want to break the angle on a handle just hold down alt and you should see this little arrow shape appear when you hover over the handle then you can just go ahead and break the handle so we're just gonna keep going until we traced all the letters [Music] remember that you can always go back and edit a specific handle or anchor point by keeping command or controlled press and then dragging that handle now I don't really like the way this see in the ER connecting so I'm just gonna create a separate path for the e so I'll just press command or control and click outside in my path and then I'll start a fresh one [Music] all right now that the word is tres we can go ahead and hype the guide in the background so we can see the path properly and adjust everything until we're satisfied so I'm going to keep command or controlled pressed and then select the points I want to adjust [Music] if for some reason you hit escape or backspacing your path disappears you can just go over to pats and select your work path to make it visible again so once you're satisfied with the shape of the letters you can go to your layers palette and create a new layer by clicking on this icon down here then go back to your pads and select your word pad now we'll go ahead and bring up the brush tool by pressing B and go to the brush palette if you don't see it over here it go to window in the menu bar and select brush next go to the brush presets tab and scroll down until you see brush 39 here and select it then we can go back to the brush tab and in the brush tip section I'm gonna set the size to 70 pixels and set the spacing to 1% then we can select transfer and under the flow control select pen pressure and leave it at 0% now that our brush is set make sure you got your new layer selected and then go back to Pat's and right-click on your word pad and select stroke path make sure you have brush selected and check simulate pen pressure and hit OK this will apply the brush stroke to your new layer so if you want to adjust your text after this point you'll have to create a new layer and get rid of this one then make your adjustments using the pen tool and again right click on your path and select stroke path [Music] now that we're satisfied with the shape we can move on to the lighting effects at this point we don't need to see the word path anymore so we can just deselect the work path by hitting escape then let's go back to our layers and select the new layer containing the rasterized text I'm just gonna rename it to text now if you want to use an image as your background make sure you use something dark so that the lighting effect stands out I'm just gonna use this dark break background by dragging it from my desktop to my workspace and then placing it underneath my text layer you can find similar dark break pictures by doing a quick google search but you can use any image as long as it's dark alright so now let's select our text and then go down here to the layer styles and select outer glow now I'm gonna use an orange color for the lighting but you can use any color you want so I'm gonna click on this little square icon to bring up the color picker and then set the hex value to FF 6 C 0 0 and hit OK then I'll make sure that the blend mode is set to normal and I'll set the opacity to 60% I'll leave the noise in the spread to zero and set the size to 190 pixels and leave the rest as is in hit ok then I'll duplicate this layer by pressing command J or ctrl J on PC and I'll go ahead and edit the effect by double clicking down here where it says outer glow this time I'll make the color a bit brighter so I'll set the hex value to F 0 9 6 to be I'll bring the opacity all the way up to 100% and bring this size down to 65 pixels now keep in mind that if you're working on a larger or smaller canvas these values would be different so if my canvas was 1,000 by 1,000 pixels for example then I would set the size to a smaller value all right now I'm gonna add in a glow to simulate the light reflecting on the brick wall in the background so depending on your background this step may or may not be necessary for you so I'll make a copy of my first text layer down here by selecting it and then pressing command J or ctrl J on PC then I'll select the copy down here and remove the effects by going right here where it says effects and then dragging it to the trash can then also like the contents of the layer by keeping command press or ctrl on PC and then clicking right here in the layer thumbnail now you can see that I have a selection around my text and I want to fill that selection with orange so I'm gonna go up here to edit and select fill for the contents we can go ahead and select color and I'll use the same hex value I used for the first outer glow which is FF 6 C 0 0 and hit OK we can now deselect the text by pressing command D or control D on PC now you can't see the orange text we just created because of these two layers here but if we just make them invisible we'll be able to see the new text so let's blur it out by going to filter then blur and Gaussian blur and let's make it super blurry so I'll crank up the radius all the way up to 500 pixels and hit OK all right so Ramos done the last thing we want to do is create some highlights so that the lighting is in so consistent throughout the text this will help add some more realism to the effect so let's create a new layer and make sure it sits above all the other layers and set the blending mode to overlay next we'll bring up the brush tool by pressing B and then right click on the canvas to select a new brush so I'll select the regular soft edged brush and I'll set the size to 300 pixels you can also change the brush diameter by holding ctrl and alt and pressing the left mouse button and then going left or right to adjust the size now make sure your foreground color is set to white and go over the parts you want to highlights with your brush I'm mostly gonna highlight the hard curves and the edges just try not to overdo it so it looks natural if you're not satisfied with a highlight feel free to undo it by hitting command Z or control Z on PC and try another one [Music] now I'm just gonna stretch these letters out a little bit I like them to look a bit whiter but that's just personal preference so I'll select all of my text and effects layers by holding down shift and then bring up the free transform tool by hitting command T or ctrl T on PC and then stretch out the bounding box [Music] all right that's about it guys now feel free to customize the effect by experimenting with the highlights and the colors and try to add in your own personal touch now I just want to take a second to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video with Squarespace you can create your own beautiful looking website in no time even if you have zero web design or coding experience they offer a huge selection of professionally designed templates which you can easily customize to make it unique you can even get your own domain directly from Squarespace so it's really a one-stop shop for anyone trying to step up their online presence by getting their own website custom portfolio or online shop I personally created two websites using Squarespace and I'm really happy with both of them their platform it the whole process incredibly easy and they have great customer service to help you out if you have any questions so if you want a free trial make sure to click the link in the video description and you'll even get a 10% discount for your membership alright guys as usual I'd really love to see what you guys do with this effect so make sure to tag me on instagram if you post your work over there if you enjoyed this video feel free to like subscribe or leave a comment guys thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Made by Mighty

Views: 695,206

Rating: 4.9386897 out of 5

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, photoshop tutorials, light painting text, light painting effect, photoshop light painting, lightpainting, lightpainting text, lightpainting effect, light painting text effect, light painting tutorial, photoshop light painting tutorial, mighty light painting, mighty, made by mighty, glowing text effect, glowing text photoshop, photoshop text effect, photoshop text tutorial

Id: pjKq2p2Rj5o

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2017