In this tutorial, I will show the processes involved in designing a God of War III Inspired Cracked Text Effect in Photoshop. I personally have been a fan of the God of War Series for a long time and got the inspiration for this tutorial from the game title text effect, and thought I could make a tut for it :)

Along the way, I would like to show you the use of custom brushsets in Photoshop and how to use them to create eye-catching effect for your design work. There are also techinques such as layer blending mode, masking and image adjustments. Have a go!

Here is a preview of the final text effect for this tutorial

Grunge BrushsetFontCrack Brushset

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 800px, fill the background layer with Black colour. Create a new layer called “background t on top of the background layer, and we’re going to do some painting with the we have just downloaded.

Firstly we want to load the brushset into Photoshop. To do this, press the “B” key to select the Brush Tool, and following the steps as shown in the following screenshot:

1. Click the down arrow next to the Brush shape/size

2. Click the right arrow on the top right corner of the brush palette

3. Click the “Load Brushes” option on the menu 

After this, you will see a window pop-up and simply select the Grunge Brush set you just downloaded/extracted, and you will see those brushes appear in the palette as shown below

(The yellow highlighted part indicates the brushset we have just loaded)

So now we have a set of grunge textures we can use to create our background texture. On the “background texture” layer, use those brushsets we just loaded and paint some irregular, grungy patterns on it:

(Hint: don’t just stick with one brush, try out a combination of them and adjust the flow and opacity for each different brushset, experiment and see what result that bring you)

Here is what I have after a bit of painting with the grunge brushset:

Step 2

Now we have a grungy style background texture. Let’s type some text onto it by using the font we downloaded at the start of this tutorial:

 On this text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

 Inner Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay (Hint: you can adjust the position of the gradient by left-click and drag on the text)

And you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this text layer once and make the text look bolder and thicker:

Step 3

Load the selection of the text layer (if you’re not sure how to do so, please take a look at Step 3 of my previous post) and create a new layer called “crack texture”. While maintaining the selection,  load the “Crack brushset” into Photoshop and on the “crack texture” layer, use this brushset to paint  over it.

You will see because we keep the selection active, the crack texture appears only within the selection:

Duplicate the “crack texture” layer once and change the blending mode of the duplcated layer to “Multiply”, you will have the following effect (the crack texture darkened) :

To create some more variation to the crack, we can add some more layers and on each added layer, apply a different crack texture from the brushset, and set the layer blending mode to “overlay”.

You can add as many layer as you wish, here is what I have after adding two more layers of crack texture:

Step 4

Now we can some colour on the text. To do this, load the selection of the text layer again, create a new layer on top of all other layers called “colour overlay”.

Here is the tricky bit: What I would like to achieve is some colour variation, so I use the Lasso Tool with a 10px feather, substract the upper portion of the selection off by holding down the Alt Key while making the selection:

While maintaining the selection, pick a colour and a soft round brush, and paint inside the selection:

Load the text layer again, create a new layer above the previous colour overlay layer, this time choose a lighter colour and soft brush, paint it on the upper portion of the text:

Step 5

Now we can add some adjustment layers to bring out some colour contrast and lightness for the overall effect. I added the following two adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > …)

Levels

Curves

And here is the final effect for this text effect: (Click to enlarge)

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are! Remember to always keep your own creativity!

Here is an alternative version I have: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Create a 3D Text Effect Using Photoshop Layer Styles

Photoshop layer styles are the first tool beginners learn to enhance text effects. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how powerful and flexible this tool is. We will go beyond the overused gradient overlay and 1px stroke effects. We will use patterns and some useful tricks to create a 3D text effect!

 Preview:

Step 1

Create a new document in Photoshop. The size I’m using is 1920×1200 pixels. Fill the background with a color of your choice 

I want to create a grunge background for the text. There are several ways to create a grunge background. I generally use a texture set on overlay, with the layer immediately below filled with a dark color, as you can see in this tutorial.
Today, I will use a pattern. In my last tutorial I explained how to create a custom grunge pattern from scratch. For the background of this tutorial I’m going to use use a dark pattern from the Tileable subtle grunge patterns set.

Just double click on the background layer to open the layer styles window, click on “pattern overlay” and select the pattern you prefer. If you don’t like the patterns visible in your library, click on the arrow near the pattern thumbnail and select another set from one available in the library. If you want to install a the new set, click on “load…” and select the new set just downloadeded

Step 2

Create a new layer, set black as the foreground color, grab a large soft brush with hardness 0% and gently paint over the edges of the canvas. This way we focus the attention to the center, by eliminating the grunge effect from the edges.

Step 3

We need a bold font with keen forms/edges. Download the free font Ash, and write something. In my case size is 140pt. Remember that layer styles vary in according with text size, so if you want to obtain my same results, use the same text size.

Step 4

From the layers window, right-click on the text layer and select Blending options. We can now start playing with layer styles.

The first thing to do is add a gradient overlay going from a dark purple (#700760) to a lighter one (#b827a2), just to give it some color

Now select Satin, set its blending mode to overlay to add a glowing effect to the text:

Finally, select inner glow to lighten the edges:

Step 5

I want to create a large stroke effect and apply new styles to the stroke too. If I simply select “stroke” from the layer styles window of the text, I only have a few options to edit. The best solution is to create the stroke shape in a new layer, then play with it.

Duplicate the text layer (ctrl+J), then remove all the styles and reduce fill opacity to 0%

Add a 7px inner stroke

Now here is the trick to create a layer with only the stroke. Create a new blank layer, select both the layer with the stroke effect and the blank one, then press ctrl+E to merge them. Title this layer “Stroke”. It contains only the stroke shape.

Step 6

We can play with layer styles again. Double click on the stroke layer and start by adding a gradient overlay. I chose a default metal gradient from the Photoshop library.

Add a 1px stroke going from black to white and black again. You can see how the stroke starts to look like metal.

To add depth, add a crisp drop shadow:

Finally, add a thin inner glow to enhance the metal effect:

Step 7

The text effect already looks nice at this stage. In the screenshot below you can see that we used only few layers to achieve this result:

However, we can add even more details using patterns with layer styles. There’s one small problem, though. If we open the styles window of the text, for example, and select a pattern, nothing will happen. This because the gradient overlay is above the pattern so the pattern is not visible.

We need to create a duplicate of the text layer (Press ctrl+J). Open the blending options of the new layer and remove all the styles. Make sure fill opacity is 0%. Now you can apply the pattern you prefer. By switching the color mode from normal to another value, you will combine the pattern with the text colors. You already know where to find patterns! Just surfour resources. We release a free item with each pattern set.

In this case, for example, I used one of our Book cover patterns with the blend mode set to Color burn.

Step 8

Using the same method, you can add even more patterns. In the screenshot below, for example, you can see how the text looks after applied one of our Tileable grunge patterns

Step 9

The same grunge pattern can be added to the stroke layer too. The details will match the metal gradients:

Step 10

The last touch to give depth to the text: duplicate the stroke layer and move it below the original text layer. Move it 3-4 px down.

 Remove all the styles and add a black color overlay:

Add a white drop shadow too:

Step 11

The text is now complete! Create a new layer, grab a large soft white brush and add more light to the center. Reduce the opacity and change the blending mode to soft light if the effect is too strong.

Step 12

If you want to modify the color combination a bit, add a gradient map layer by going to Layer>New Adjustment layer>Gradient map. I added a default Photoshop gradient going from purple to green to orange. The layer is set to overlay with the opacity around 40%.

Finito! Here is the result:

END RESULT

Create a new canvas with a size of 500 x 300 px in photoshop, then double click on the background layer to remove the key and make it a normal layer. Further fill gradient overlay layer style on the layer as shown below.

Next, create a new layer above the previous layer (layer 1). Select both layers by shift + click on the keyboard, then press Ctrl + E to unify the layers.

Then to the menu Filter> Brush Strokes> Sprayed Strokes and input value-value that is available as shown below.

Until this step, you will get the following photoshop design.

Next add the text on your worksheet, I made my tutorial PSDESAIN text.

Give the layer style to the text as shown below design

Like the previous method to remove the layer style, create a new layer. Then select the new layer to layer text and press Ctrl + E to merge the layers at once would eliminate the layer style.

Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and the bottom of the text selection, press delete on your keyboard to remove it

 Subsequently remove parts that are not needed as PSDESAIN text below.

 With the line tool, create a line under the text.

 With the line tool, re-create a form like the design below, and erase as the above methods

Duplicate the layer "PSDesain" it (Ctrl + J), and place the layer below the original layer PSDesain. In the duplicate layer results, give motion blur in Filter> Blur> Motion blur, and settings such as the following design

The last step, give the Outer Glow layer style on each layer is (kacuali background layer)

You can also add text to your design results and be a simple text manipulation you design results