How to add REALISTIC TEXT to a PHOTO - Photoshop tutorial

 

Credit by :  photoshopCAFE

How to Add Realistic Text to Photo Hey Cafe Crew, it's Colin Smith here and this week, I'm going to show you how to add some text to this barrel that make it look realistic like it was kind of engraved in there. So I'm just going to take advantage of some Blending Modes and some different things inside of Photoshop. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a-- open up my Layers panel,grab the Type Tool and let's select a color. So what I'm going to do is grab the kind of the darker color there, so what I'm doing there is let's find it. So notice what I did is I selected the Color Picker there and then I just went in there and I'm just using the Eyedropper to sample, maybe, the darker wood on that barrel there. All right, so we've got kind of a dark brown color and I'm just going to click and nowI'm using a condensed font, it's Bernard MT Condensed. And I'm going to type in PS CAFE, you know, just for PHOTOSHOP CAFE. I would just do PHOTOSHOP CAFE. Okay, so there we go, we got PHOTOSHOP CAFE there, and let me just drag it into position. I'm going to put it about there. And now I want to scale it up to fit and the quickest way to do that is to hit Ctrl T,that would be Command T on Mac, move to the corner, hold down the Shift key to constraint and then we're just going to drag it out in proportion and we're going to fill up that barrel. I'm just going to hit Enter now to apply it. Okay, so we've kind of positioned it up. There's two things we need to do. One, we kind of want to make it wrap around a little bit and number two, we really want to kind of make it look like it's not just stuck on there, but it's actually part ofthe texture so it's actually textured in there, so, why don't we do that right now. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on it. In the Layers panel, right click on the Type and then choose Rasterize Type. And what it's going to do is it's just going to convert it now to pixels so that we can adjust it and change it. So we now want to distort these pixels, so we're going to hit Ctrl T; that would be Command T, for Transform. This brings up the Free Transform. And you probably noticed I use that all the time and I love doing, and then we can right click in here and you're going to see there's some options. The first one I'm going to start with is Warp because what this Warp does is it enables us to kind of match curves and it works nicely on rounded surfaces, so if we're working ona sphere, even for example if this would work, so I'm just kind of notice as I can just pull down, see how it just kind of causes that text to warp. Now we don't have to rasterize it to do this, but some of the other things we are goingto do, we will. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab the middle part and I'm just goingto kind of pull it down a little bit, so it's just kind of bulging a little bit more in the middle, and maybe just give it a little bit, and the edges here, I'm just going toking of pull these down a little bit. There we go. And what we're trying to do is make it look like it's kind of following the contour there. We could zoom in a little bit--there we go--so we could see better. And let me just make it follow that contour. So notice with this Warp Tool, you can just kind of click on the points or you can actuallyjust click inside these different areas themselves to make this work. So, I'm just going to kind of pull that down a little down a little bit, just kind of following the curvature. You'll also notice there's some little arms here that you can use if you wanted to doit that way. I personally like to just kind of click and drag a little bit. So we're just kind of following the curvature there and maybe in the middle, I'm just goingto pull this down just a little bit because it kind of feels like I just wanted it togo like that. All right, so let's apply it. We're just going to hit Enter to apply it and that's not looking too bad. Now the other thing you can do is you can hit Ctrl T, that's Command T, for Free Transform,right click and then we get to choose the Distort. So if you wanted to just kind of move those corners around, you could also do that, butit's just going to move the corners by themselves, see that?So, there's only four points. We're now actually going to curve it like we did before with the Distortion Tool, butyou could do that to kind of fine-tune it a little bit. All right, so the next thing we want to do is we want to kind of make it blend in a littlebit, so we're going to change the Blend Mode. So we could try something like maybe the Overlay Blend Mode. That's working pretty good. You can see that overlay. Now we can start to see the texture and everything kind of come through there a little bit and that's looking kind of nice. Now we could roughen it up a little bit. If we wanted to do that, we could just grab a brush. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a Layer Mask right there, and then we're going to choose black as a foreground. Make sure that we grab a brush. We can hit the B key or just choose the Brush Tool. Make sure Opacity is all the way to 100 and Blend Mode is in Normal. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to find a rough brush and you'll seesome of these brushes too. You can load this in. If you actually go up there, you can load in different types of brushers in here. You'll see, you know, dry medium brushes and different things like that. We could load those in. Let me just append them so you can see them and you can see these kind of brushes. You can kind of come in here and you can use those. So just kind of get in those edges, let's grab this one, for example, kind of, see that?You just kind of eating out of that a little bit, just kind of gives it a little bit more real; so I'm just going to use my Waco tablet here for a second and just kind of just geta few little bits here and there. Now you can download brushes from places like Brushstroke or Deviant Art and stuff like that,and you could find some custom brushes that would actually do a much better job of this. I'm just using the default brushes right now. In case you don't have these, you know, you haven't downloaded it in yet, but you know,you can see these different types of brushes. These are just the default Photoshop ones I'm just kind of using. And we're just going to grab those and maybe just kind of just kind of nibbling at those edges a little bit to create a little bit more of a kind of a distressed look. And this is also what you would do if you wanted to just create basic distressed type. Now I'm not going to get too carried away because I don't want it to be too beaten upland distressed, but you get the general idea right there and maybe just one there just for fun. All right, so you can see how that's going. All right, we could almost call that a day, but there's another thing we can do to make it look like, maybe it was seared in there a little bit and it's got a little bit ofa depth, like maybe they used something like a brand or something like that. So what we can do is with the Blend Modes, we can go under here and we can use what is known as an Inner Shadow. And if we choose the Inner Shadow here, I'll just turn the Opacity all the way up to 100and give it a little bit of Distance and see how that gives it that kind of chiseled in look. Of course, right now, we got the wrong angle, so we change the angle and if we do it there,you can see it starts to look like it's chiseled into the wood, see that?And you'll see you'll get a little bit more realism there. So, anyway, that's a really simple little tutorial there on how to add Type and make-it look a lot more realistic. Now notice that the Blending Modes play a big part in making this look realistic and-there's a ton of things you can do with Layer Blending Modes. And because of that, I've actually created a free e-book for you. There's no advertising right here. It's just pure content. Check out that e-book. It gives an example of every single Blending Mode and also a bunch of places where it could be used. It's a kind of thing I could sell for probably $10 or something but check it out in the link underneath. Grab that e-book. I'm sure you're going to find it useful. So anyway, thanks, guys, for watching. If you enjoyed this, make sure you become part of the Cafe Crew and you can do that just by hitting that Subscribe button. And every single week, I'm going to give you a new tutorial on Photoshop, on Lightproof drones, and different types of gadgets. I know you're going to enjoy it, so thanks, guys. Add a Like and, also, don't forget to hit that little bell on YouTube. That little bell will give you an alert when I post a new tutorial. And, also, of course, don't forget it's important, leave a comment. Let's get a discussion going. I do my best to answer all the questions and so thanks, guys, for checking this out. Until next week, I'll see you at the Cafe.