Glowing Coloured Text With Photoshop

In this tutorial we’re going to create some text with a really gorgeous glowing effect. The colours are soft and vibrant and the result is a beautiful piece of typography that has a light, fresh vibe with just a hint of retro eighties styling. So fire up Photoshop, create a new document about 450 by 200 pixels and let’s get started!

The Background

#130508

For the coloured text to look its best, we want to use a dark background with just a hint of colour. Pure black would be too flat and could kill the warmth of the light effect. We want to bring the text to life so let’s choose a nice deep hue like a deep red: #130508.

The Type

Century Gothic
We’re going to have the text overlapping in the final image, so what we have to do is put each letter onto it’s own layer.

You can use whatever font you prefer but to get the best from the colourful effect it’s better to go for something clean and elegant. In this example I’m using 72 pt Century Gothic in white.

Using the Type Tool, we are going to type out our text one letter at a time, applying the text, then creating a new type layer with our next letter until we have a separate layer for each letter.

Our text is kind of all over the place now so let’s align it the quick way. Click on the top type layer in the Layers Palette then Shift-click on the bottom type layer so that all of our type layers are now selected.

Now go to the Options bar and click on the icon for Align bottom edges.

We should now have something that looks like this.

Now what we want to do is deselect all of the layers (Ctrl-d) before reselecting each of them individually and moving the text inwards so that all of the letters are overlapping.

The Gradient

Now we’re going to apply a gradient. So, we’ll create a new layer above all of the type layers for our gradient and then we’ll use theGradient Tool to draw a White-to-Transparent gradient from top to bottom. Hold down Shift when dragging the gradient tool to keep things straight and try to get a nice level of fading where the text is.

What we want to do now is use the individual type layers for each letter to create shapes from the gradient.

So for the first letter, Ctrl+Click the Layer Thumbnail in the Layers Palette to select the layer contents. Now, what we want to do is select the Gradient Layer without selecting its contents. To do this just click the layer in the Layers Palette. So now the gradient layer should be active while the contents of the letter layer remain selected.

And now if we Copy and Paste, we should creat a copy of the gradient in the shape of the letter.

Do this for the rest of the letters, remembering to make sure that the gradient layer is selected before cutting out for each letter.

Once we’re done we can hide all of the letter and gradient layers and we should have something that looks a bit like this:

Colouring In

Before we go any further, since we’re going to be adding even more layers, you might want to take a minute to organise everything we have created so far, in whichever way you prefer.

Okay, now we’re going to create a new layer above all of our gradient letters. This layer is going to be the one we use for colour, so let’s select a bunch of nice bright colours. You can go for whatever you like, these are just a suggestion.

So let’s select the Paint Bucket Tool, and a choose a nice bright color. Create a selection of your first gradient-letter (ignore any error messages about no selection being shown) and fill in that selection with your selected colour on the new layer. Make sure you have set this layers Blending Mode to Screen.

Keep going until you’ve done this for all of your letters. Remember to put each colour on a new layer and don’t be afraid to use the same colour more than once (it can create a nice rhythm). Then you should end up with something like this:

Looking Good!

Fade Out

Once you’re happy with the result, select all of your gradient-letter layers and Merge them down into a single layer (Ctrl + E). Then do the same for all of your colour layers, making sure that the blending mode is still set to Screen.

So now we have two layers. One of the gradient layers and the other of the colours for the letters.

Let’s Duplicate the colour layer and work on that.

Now on our newly duplicated layer, we’re going to grab the Eraser Tool and use it to subtly erase the bottom parts of the letters in the colour layer to fade out the colour of the text. The best way to do this is to use a normal Round Brush of about 60 pixels in size, set to Hardness 50% and Opacity 75%. Again, you might want to play around with these values until you achieve the exact result you’re after.

Glow It Up

Okay, so now we’re going to pretty things up a bit and apply a sexy glow to the coloured letters.

Let’s duplicate our gradient-letters layer. Not the color layer! And on this newly created layer we’re going to apply a Gaussian Blur(From the main menu: Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur). You should experiment with different values for the Radius to get the level of blur that you want but it should be a Radius value of somewhere between 1 and 6.

Now do the same for the colour layer we just worked on- the one with the fade-out effect- duplicate and blur it. Again, you should experiment with different settings like setting this layer‘s Blending Mode to Lighten or Screen or duplicating the layer more than once until you achieve a good level of colour saturation and intensity.

Now we’re going to duplicate this layer again. The reason for this is that it gives us more options for playing around with the intensity of the effects in the next step.

Tweaking

Now we should have quite a few layers on the go! We should have something like this…

• Colours Layer faded with blur 2
• Colours Layer faded with blur
• Colours Layer faded
• Colours Layer
• Gradient Layer with blur
• Gradient Layer

The point of having all of the effects on different duplicated layers is that it makes it really easy to switch them off and on and alter the levels of intensity quickly.

Reflection

Now to add a reflection!

It’s pretty simple. Select all of the layers being used for the text effect and Duplicate them. Merge these duplicated layers into a new single layer.

Next, Flip the layer Vertically (Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical) and using the Move Tool, drag it below the original.

Now we want to fade out the reflection, so using the Eraser Tool, with a brush size of about 50, Hardness set to 0%, Opacity set to 75%, erase the bottom of the upside-down reflection layer. (Remember you can hold Shift while erasing to erase in a perfect line).

And finally we can tweak the intensity of the reflection by adjusting the Layer Opacity.

Finishing Touches

And now just for a few finishing touches!

Let’s create a new layer behind all of our text. If we set it’s Blend Mode to Overlay we can create a nice soft glow by drawing on it with a large white brush.

And finally, we can Duplicate the original colours layer and add other effects like a Motion Blur.

Ta-Da!