Hello everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics
back with another video tutorial for Adobe Photoshop.
Today I'm going to show you how to add grungy, distressed, ink stamped effects to your type,
logos, or illustrations.
The effect resembles the letterpress printing method, or any other impact print method,
like a rubber stamp, or an old typewriter.
I'll show you how to distress your clean digital artwork to give it a fuzzy, irregular appearance
as if the ink is bleeding to distort the outline of the artwork, causing some areas to blend
together.
I'll then provide you with my free Dirty Surface textures to simulate how parts of a stamped
print don't have enough ink coverage, giving it that lovely textured retro print look.
Then we'll use those same dirty surface textures to finish off the artwork with a complementary
dirty background to completely transform the clean digital art into a cheap letterpress
print with gritty details.
But first, if you want access to a library of design resources to use in your projects,
follow the link in the description to check out Envato Elements....
Create a
new document to contain the artwork we're going to process with distressed letterpress
effects. I'm using a size of 3000x2000px, which just happens to be the dimensions of
the textures we'll be using.
This effect can be applied to all kinds of single colour artwork, whether it's a lettering
piece, a logo, or even an illustration.
I'm composing a quick text layout for It's Grime Time using a couple of my favourite
fonts.
Marttabuck is a really nice script font that always seems to have exactly the right letter
shapes I'm looking for whenever I'm working on a design with a cursive brush script. This
one is a premium font but you can pick it up for $13, or with up to a 50% discount by
following the link in the description.
The apostrophe is overlapping the letter T, so a quick kerning adjustment is made by holding
the ALT key while pressing the left or right cursor keys.
Proxima Nova is another of my go-to fonts. If you're an Adobe CC user, which you may
well be if you're watching this video, this huge font family is available as part of the
Adobe Fonts library. Activate it by following the link in the description.
I'm using the Condensed Black version for the word Grime, then the regular Black version
to fill out a little more space for the narrower word, Time.
You can add some interesting type effects by clicking the Warp Text icon while the type
is selected. Add a subtle Arc Upper effect of just 5% for the bottom text.
Then match the outline but with an Arc Lower effect with minus 5%.
Shift+Click to highlight all the text elements and combine them into one Smart Object so
they can be processed as one layer.
The first filter to apply to generate the distressed letterpress effect is a Gaussian
blur. Use a value of around 10px.
Next, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
Max out the Amount slider and set the Threshold to Zero. Then experiment with the Radius slider
to see how it affects the appearance of the artwork.
The higher the radius, then thicker the ink bleed effect becomes. Keep the slider somewhere
around the mid point for now.
The sharpening is maxed out but it hasn't managed to fully sharpen the outline, so add
another Unsharp Mask filter.
This time, max out the threshold slider too.
Go to Filter > Distort > Ripple next to add further irregularities to the outlines. Set
the Size to Large then find a subtle value by comparing the preview window.
Since we're using a Smart Object, all these effects can be adjusted by double-clicking
the effect in the Layers panel.
Download and open one of my free Dirty Surface textures. Number 10 is a good one.
Select All with CMD+A, or CTRL+A on Windows, then Copy with CMD+C. In the main document,
Paste with CMD+V.
Clip the texture layer so it is only applied to the text layer underneath by holding ALT
while clicking between the layers.
Convert this texture layer to a Smart Object too so a sharpening filter can be applied
non-destructively.
Add an Unsharp Mask filter and move the sliders around to find a nice balance where the details
are enhanced but they aren't too crispy.
This is where the Threshold slider comes in to help tone things down.
Unlink the clipping by ALT+Clicking between the layers again. Go to File > Save As to
save this texture image as a PSD. Give it a recognisable name like displacement map.
Revert the change by clipping the layer again.
Activate the artwork layer, then go to Filter > Distort > Displace. OK the default settings
and find the displacement map file we just saved.
The artwork is then processed based on the details of the texture file, which helps to
add these little scatterings to grunge around the edges.
These gritty details are a little too sharp and pixelated, so add a Gaussian Blur filter.
Reduce the value right down to 0.1, then increase it incrementally to find a value that just
softens up the details. Around 0.5 should do.
Make a duplicate of the artwork smart object by dragging it onto the new layer icon. Drag
it to the top of the layer stack. This might break the link of the clipping mask, so reset
it by alt-clicking.
Reduce the Fill value to zero for this duplicate layer. This will allow just the layer style
effects to show without the solid fill colour of the actual artwork.
Double click the layer and add an Inner Glow effect. Configure the values to balance the
Choke and Size effects to produce a black haloing around the artwork, similar to how
a stamp would apply the ink thicker towards the edges.
Let's finish off this effect by giving the background a light grey fill using the ALT+backspace
shortcut.
Open up one of the other dirty surface textures and copy and paste it above the background.
Invert the texture using the CMD+I shortcut so it's black on white, then set the blending
mode to Multiply to make the white area transparent, allowing the grey background to show through.
Turn this layer into a Smart Object and run a quick Unsharp Mask filter to bring out the
grungy details.
The final result is a letterpress style ink stamp effect that transforms your clean and
digital text into a grungy, distressed print effect.