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Hairy Text Effect

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About this lesson

Give text a furry feel within a few easy steps.

Exercise files

Download the Photoshop file used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Hairy Text Effect.psd
2.8 MB

Quick reference

Topic: Hairy Text effect

Give text a furry feel within a few easy steps.

When to use

Ok, so the popularity of cat videos kind of says it all. We LOVE furry things. This video will teach you how to put a furry/hairy surface on anything.  So when in doubt about how to put your design stamp on something, just think ‘how do I make this perrrrfect!’

Instructions

Basic texture text

  1. Start with text. A thicker font works best.
  2. Place fur texture on top of text.

Add a layer mask

  1. In the layers Panel, with the fur layer active, hold down the Command (mac) or Control (win) and click on the text layer (will make selection of the text).
  2. With the Fur layer still active click the add layer mask button at the bottom of the layers panel.

Use a custom brush to add hair

  1. Brush tool (B).
  2. Load in additional Brushes (DP Brushes) and choose ‘DP Crackle’.
  3. Menu/window/Brush or F5.
  4. Brush Tip Shape Section: Size:70, Spacing 5%.
  5. Shape Dynamics: Size Jitter: 100%, Minimum Diameter: 0%, Angle Jitter: 10%, Roundness Jitter: 100%. Set Control to Direction.
  6. Save if wanted for future use.

Paint in hair

  1. The new custom brush and the foreground color set to white.
  2. Paint in the layer mask, around edges of the text, or;

Apply a brush stroke to the text path

  1. In the layers panel right click on the text layer and select ‘Create Work Path’.
  2. Grab the pen tool and right click on the visible text path.
  3. Choose the Stoke Path option.
  4. In the dialogue box select brush and turn simulate pressure on.
  5. Go back to the brush tool.
  6. Press enter a few times until you get the density you want.

Soften a little

  1. Go to Menu/Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur: Size 0.3.
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  • 00:04 Hey, everyone.
  • 00:04 Howard Pinsky here with a very hairy Photoshop tutorial.
  • 00:08 I've been asked many times to create a tutorial on how to achieve furry text.
  • 00:13 So, let me go ahead and show you a super simple way of doing just that.
  • 00:17 There are three things that you're going to need to complete this tutorial.
  • 00:20 First is your text.
  • 00:22 Second is some sort of texture,
  • 00:23 like this leopard fur which I found over at ShutterStock.
  • 00:26 And third is a customized brush, which we're gonna look at shortly.
  • 00:30 In terms of the text, the font in size is completely up to you.
  • 00:34 But, from my experience, using a thicker font, like the one you see here,
  • 00:38 tends to work best, especially if you're going to be working with layer styles.
  • 00:42 Next is the texture.
  • 00:43 Over at Shutterstock I found a really nice,
  • 00:46 high quality image of leopard fur which are gonna work great for this effect.
  • 00:50 Now when you're placing your texture on top of the text,
  • 00:53 you wanna make sure that's quite a bit bigger on all sides.
  • 00:56 So the bigger the texture the better.
  • 00:58 But at the same time, you probably wanna include as many of the spots as possible,
  • 01:03 so you may wanna scale it downwards, if it's a little bit too large.
  • 01:07 Now the simple solution to this effect would be to right-click on
  • 01:10 the Texture layer in your Layers panel and create a Clipping Mask.
  • 01:13 Which would place that texture inside of the text and allow you to move it around.
  • 01:18 If this is what you're looking for, then great.
  • 01:20 However, if you want a more hairy effect, let's back up a step and
  • 01:24 forget about the Clipping Mask.
  • 01:25 Instead, we're gonna be working with a Layer Mask, which is
  • 01:28 gonna give us a little more flexibility when it comes to adding the hair.
  • 01:32 To add a Layer Mask, first hold down your Cmd key on the Mac, Ctrl key on Windows,
  • 01:37 and then click on the text layer's thumbnail to turn it into a selection.
  • 01:41 Once a selection has been made, with the texture layer still active,
  • 01:44 click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of your Layers panel.
  • 01:48 The result should look identical to when we used the Clipping mask.
  • 01:51 But because we now have the ability to easily hide or
  • 01:54 show portions of the texture layer, we can use a custom brush to add in the hair.
  • 01:59 And to do that, let's turn to our Brushes.
  • 02:02 Pressing your B key will quickly activate your Brush tool,
  • 02:05 which you can also find in your Tools bar to the left.
  • 02:07 Now at the top on your options bar, you're gonna find your brush picker,
  • 02:11 which includes many of the brushes that come with Photoshop.
  • 02:14 However the brush that we want to use isn't available by default.
  • 02:18 Clicking on the gear icon at the top right corner will reveal the preset packs that
  • 02:22 can be loaded in.
  • 02:24 DP Brushes is what we're looking for.
  • 02:26 These brushes were created by Daniel Presedo on the Photoshop team.
  • 02:29 And until this week, I had no idea what DP stood for.
  • 02:32 That's one mystery of life solved.
  • 02:34 So when this window pops up,
  • 02:35 pressing a pen will add Daniel's brushes to the bottom of your current list.
  • 02:39 The brush that we're going to start with will be DP Crackle,
  • 02:42 which should be the second last brush in the picker.
  • 02:45 You also wanna make sure that the mode is set to Normal, and that the Opacity and
  • 02:50 Flow are both set to 100%.
  • 02:52 Now I mentioned at the beginning that we're gonna need a customized brush.
  • 02:55 For an effect like this using any of the brushes as they are will not give us
  • 02:59 a believable result.
  • 03:01 So to customize a brush in Photoshop, you're gonna wanna open the brush panel,
  • 03:05 which you can find under the Window menu at the top.
  • 03:08 Once it's visible, in the Brush Tip Shape section, go ahead and decrease the brush
  • 03:13 size to around 70 pixels and the spacing to around 25 percent.
  • 03:17 Now it's good to know that if you're starting with a larger or
  • 03:19 smaller font, you may want to experiment with these settings to
  • 03:22 get the result that you're looking for.
  • 03:25 Next let's hop into Shape Dynamics.
  • 03:27 To give some variation to the size of the hairs, go ahead and
  • 03:30 crack up the size jitter to a 100% and keep the minimum diameter at 0.
  • 03:35 Now to also give some variation to the angle of the hairs,
  • 03:38 increase the angle jitter to around 10% and then set the control at Direction.
  • 03:43 This will allow the brush to rotate as it's being drawn around the letters.
  • 03:48 Lastly, increasing the Roundness Jitter will also help move away from
  • 03:51 a repeating design, 100% should work well.
  • 03:55 All right, the customization is complete.
  • 03:57 Nothing too complex.
  • 03:58 But if you think you may wanna use this brush for
  • 04:00 future designs, it may be a good idea to save it.
  • 04:03 Pressing the new brush icon at the bottom will allow you to name and
  • 04:07 save your brush.
  • 04:08 Perfect.
  • 04:09 Now it's time to brush in the hairs,
  • 04:11 because we're working with a Layer Mask anything that is currently hidden can be
  • 04:15 easily revealed by painting in with a white brush.
  • 04:18 So make sure that your foreground color is set to white, and paint away.
  • 04:24 Now clearly there has to be a better way, right?
  • 04:26 This will take ages.
  • 04:28 Okay there is.
  • 04:29 There's an option within Photoshop that can allow you to brush along a path and
  • 04:33 luckily we can easily create a path from existing text.
  • 04:37 If you right-click on your Type Layer in your Layers panel
  • 04:40 selecting the Create Work Path option will create a path from your text.
  • 04:44 It may be hard to see, but you should see a very thin line around your letters,
  • 04:48 that's your path which you can easily hide or show with your command or
  • 04:51 Ctrl+Shift+H shortcut.
  • 04:53 Now in the process of creating that path your text layer was probably made active.
  • 04:59 Before you move on, make sure that not only are the texture layer active, but
  • 05:03 make sure that its Layer Mask is active as well.
  • 05:05 If you see a frame surrounding the mask, you're in good shape.
  • 05:09 So now that we have a path to brush on, go ahead and
  • 05:12 grab your Pen Tool, shortcut key P, and right-click anywhere on the path.
  • 05:17 A few options down, select Stroke Path.
  • 05:20 These are the tools that we can use on our Path.
  • 05:22 But as we've been customizing a brush, we're gonna stick with the Brush option.
  • 05:26 And we're gonna make sure to keep Simulate Pressure off so
  • 05:29 that the opacity is even throughout the design.
  • 05:32 Once you press OK,
  • 05:33 you're gonna see a few hairs have been added to the outside of the text.
  • 05:36 It's a good start, but it needs more.
  • 05:39 Here is a neat trick, now that we have told Photoshop what to
  • 05:42 use to stroke the path, hop back over to your brush tool, shortcut key B, and
  • 05:46 simply press Return or Enter on your keyboard to repeat that stroke.
  • 05:51 Keep pressing Return or Enter a few times until you are happy with the density of
  • 05:54 the hair, 5 or 6 times should give you nice results.
  • 05:58 That is looking much better.
  • 05:59 Now finally, depending on the texture that you used,
  • 06:02 you may want to Blur the mask ever so slightly.
  • 06:05 I'm gonna add a very subtle Gaussian blur of around 0.3 pixels,
  • 06:09 just to soften out the hairs a touch.
  • 06:11 And the last thing you might want to do is to add a very slight Inner Shadow to
  • 06:15 the Texture Layer to add some depth, but it's completely optional.
  • 06:19 And that should do it.
  • 06:20 A fairly simple way to create hairy text in Photoshop.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Fireworks Text Effect
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