Welcome to the Photoshop Training Channel.
In this tutorial, I'll be showing you how to create a Furry Text Effect using Photoshop
CS6, but the techniques I'll be showing you in this video will work with older versions
of Photoshop.
We'll create the furry text using a picture of my cat—Chicharito, or Kitty, as we call
him, since no one else can pronounce his name.
This is a picture of him and notice that this is not the best image in the world.
I chose this picture because I wanted to show you how to achieve amazing results just from
a regular image.
The beauty of this technique is that you can use an image of any furry creature and still
get great results.
For example, I have the text "Furry" that I use for the texture of my cat.
I also created one using a Cheetah texture, a Tiger texture, and a Dog texture.
So, as you can see, no matter what fur you use, you still get great results.
So, let's get started.
The first thing I'll do is delete this text layer, since I'm going to be creating everything
from scratch.
And just as a point of reference, my canvass size is set to 1920 pixels by 1080.
The first thing I'm going to do is create a new text layer.
I'm going to click on the Text Tool and set my font to Arial Rounded, and set my Font
Size to 151 points.
Then, I'm going to type the word Furry.
I'm going to move that to the center of my composition.
And then, I'm going to bring in the picture of my cat, and I'd drag that tab down, Click
and Drag the picture over on to my composition.
I'm going to close this window since we won't need this image anymore.
Next, I'm going to rename the layer I just brought in, and I'm going to rename it by
double clicking on the name, and typing "kitty texture."
Next, I'm going to click on the "Furry" text layer and click to load a selection around
the font.
And I'll turn off the layer so you can see that.
Now that the font is selected, click on the kitty texture, and click on the Mask icon
to apply a mask.
I'm going to shut off the furry layer since we won't be needing it anymore.
And, as you can see, it's already looking pretty good.
There are a few problems we need to fix.
The first problem is that the texture is too big.
As you can see, the first strands are just too big.
They don't look right.
So we need to decrease the size of our texture.
We can fix this first problem by scaling down the size of the texture layer, but we don't
want to scale down the mask as well, just the layer.
So, in order to scale them separately, we need to uncheck the little link, here, so
we can work with them separately.
So, first, we're going to click on the kitty texture layer, as opposed to the Layer Mask,
and you'll know it's selected because you'll see a white square around the actual layer,
not the Layer Mask.
And, press Ctrl T on your keyboard, Click and Drag the image, so you can position it
to whatever place you want, and hold the handles on the top right, and bring that down while
holding the Shift key to constrain the image.
And I'm just going to keep doing that till I reposition the image.
And it looks like I'm going to have to scale this down all the way up to the "r", the first
"r."
That's when the texture starts looking good, in my opinion.
I'm going to press Enter when I'm done, and now, we have to bring back the other letters.
To do so, we're just going to Clone the texture from the left side, onto the right side.
So, I'm going to click on my Clone Tool.
I'm going to hold Alt on my keyboard, on whatever section I think looks good, and in this case,
it's this place right here, right below the "F." I'm going to start drawing in the second
"r" in the word furry.
Okay.
Then I'm going to draw in the "y" and it’s okay if I'm getting the couch or the blanket,
here.
I'm just going to redraw that part and get rid of that.
And that's looking pretty good.
I'm not liking the bottom of the "u" so much, so I'm just going to redraw that in, as well.
And this "r" needs some work as well, so I'll
go ahead and color that in.
And I think this is looking pretty good.
The next step is we're going to make sure that we don't have these hard edges around
our text, and that we, actually, have strands of fur coming out, so we have a more realistic
look.
There's a couple of ways we can do that.
One way is by selecting our Brush Tool and clicking on the Grass Brush.
With this brush, if we set the foreground to white, as well as the background, and then,
click on our Layer Mask, we can come in and draw those strands into the text ourselves.
Now, the problem with that is that we, literally, have to draw around the entire image.
That's going to take a long time.
The second problem with that is that if you're trying to draw the vertical line, you're going
to have some problems and I'll show you why.
You're going to get hard edges of the bottom of the grass, like so.
And that's not going to look good.
So, one way of solving this problem is by creating a new brush; a new brush that has
no hard edges.
What we're going to create is, essentially, a fur ball.
So we need to create a new brush.
Go to File, New, and create a new file that's 200 pixels wide by 200 pixels high.
Press OK.
Still, with our Grass Brush selected, come into the new layer, increase the size of your
brush, and set it to about 60 pixels.
Then, create a new layer and draw a straight line back and forth horizontally, just back
and forth.
When you're done, duplicate that layer, go to Edit, Transform, Vertical, and bring that
down, just a little bit.
Next, go to Image, Canvass Rotation, 90 degrees clockwise, so we can draw that top part of
it.
Create a new layer, and we'll just draw the top strands here, and that's looking pretty
good.
And, create one more layer, go to Image, Image Rotation, Flip Canvass Vertically, so we can
draw the other side, and that's looking pretty good.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to hold Shift and select all the layers, press Ctrl
G to put them into a group, Ctrl T to Transform, and I'm just going to Scale this down.
I want more of a feel of a ball; not necessarily a rectangle as we have before.
And that's looking pretty okay.
What I'm going to do now is turn this into a brush.
To do that, I'm going to go into Edit, Define Brush Preset, and I'll name it “kitty fur,”
and press OK.
Next, I'm going to go back into the composition I was working on, and I'm going to press Ctrl
Z to Undo those changes that I did.
Now, I have to figure out a way of tracing this image automatically.
I don't want to do it by hand.
So, I'm going to select the brush that I've just created and you know what it is, because
if you hover over it, you'll see the name you gave it; in this case, kitty fur.
I'm going to come back into my image, set my foreground to white, and click on my Layer
Mask.
And as you can see, I can draw in some of those hairs now.
And, actually, it does a pretty good job of doing that.
I'm just going to press Ctrl Z because, again, like I said before, I don't want to trace
the image.
I want Photoshop to do the work for me.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to decrease the size of this brush tool about 70 or so.
Then, I'm going to Ctrl Click on the Layer Mask, so I have the selection around my text.
Go into Paths.
And if you don't see Paths, you can activate them on Window and selecting Paths.
Click on the down pointing arrow on the right side of the tab, and click on Make Work Path.
The default is 2.0 pixels.
That will work fine.
Press OK.
And what that does is it created a new Work Path that we can select a plus Stroke, which
is what we'll do to create our first strands in our text.
So I'm just going to highlight the entire work path, right click on it, and select Stroke
Path.
Make sure that the Brush is the right tool selected, and press OK.
Notice that Photoshop automatically created the hair strands that we were looking for.
But, they're not what I wanted.
It's better but it's not what I wanted.
I wanted some hairs to stick up more than others.
You know what I mean?
So, some are high, some are low, or some are higher, some are lower.
To do that, we need to apply some settings into our Brush, and I'll show you how to do
that.
So I'll press Ctrl Z to Undo those changes, and click on the Brush Presets.
I'm going to apply some scattering, some shape dynamics, and the first thing we'll do is
make sure your angle is set to 10% or so.
And, again, these are the settings that are going to work for me.
Yours might be a little bit different, but this will get you started, at least; size
my round jitter to about 50%, and click on Scattering.
Count, we're going to change it to 5.
Brush Tip, the Spacing, we're going to bring that in just a little bit, to about 15.
And this should be okay.
Let's give it a try.
Once again, I'm going to Zoom Out so I can select everything.
Click on Fit on Screen, use my Path Move Tool, highlight all of my Paths, and right click
on the layer, and click on Stroke Path.
Brush is okay.
Press OK.
And let me see what that looks like, and I'm going to Zoom In just a little bit, and that's
looking much better.
You can see that it's no longer just a straight line.
It's acting like real fur would.
Some strands stick out more than others, which is exactly what I was looking for.
And, now, I just got to fix some things.
For example, you can still see the part of the blanket or the couch that the cat was
laying on, so we got to remove that part.
And, for the most part, everything else looks okay, except for the "y" or the bottom of
the "r" there, but that can easily be fixed, and we'll fix that as we did before by clicking
on our Clone Tool, selecting a piece of the texture.
In this case, I'll probably go with the "u" here, but before I do that, I need to come
back and make sure I'm painting on the right layer, which is this layer, right here, with
the kitty texture on the actual layer, not the Layer Mask.
And, I'm going to Alt Click on my texture, and then, start drawing in in the areas that
I need to, okay?
And I need to fix the "r" as well, and a little bit down here.
And I can see these whiskers, here, so I guess I should hide those, as well.
There are some whiskers on this side as well.
And, I think, that's looking pretty good.
I'm going to Zoom Out so I can see the whole screen.
I'm going to press Ctrl H to hide the Paths.
The next thing is to get this text some shape.
To do that, I'm going to duplicate the layer.
On the top layer, I'm going to create Layer Style.
It's going to be a Bevel and Emboss.
I'm going to crank up the Size to about 62 to 65 pixels.
I'm going to change the highlight mode to Overlay, and I'm going to bring the Opacity
down just a little bit, 55% or so should be okay.
Multiply, I'm going to bring down to about 40%, and I'm going to uncheck my Global Light,
and move my Global Light so that the light is emitting from the top.
As you can see the light in the background is coming from the top, so I want the same
lighting on my text, and I'm going to press OK.
Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is bring the link back onto our furry text because
I want to move these two together.
So I'm going to click on the layer, make sure that my layer is selected and I'm going to
hold Shift on the keyboard and press down three times—one, two, three, and, then,
left three times as well—one, two, three; both while holding Shift.
I'm going to double click on the layer, click on Color Overlay, and set my color to a dark
gray, and set my layer to Multiply, and bring the Opacity down to 58- 60%, whatever works
for you.
I'm going to stay with 70, actually, and I'm going to press OK.
And then notice that my layer is a little too low, so I'm just going to move it up just
a little bit, and push it to the right, just a little bit, using the arrow keys.
And this is just to give the text some dimension.
The next thing we're going to do is I'm going to create one more layer on top of all the
other layers, and I got to think of my lighting.
If the light is coming from the top, where else would I get light?
And I'm just going to paint this light onto my actual texture.
So I'm going to click on the Brush Tool and I'm just going to draw in with white wherever
I think the light would hit if this were a real thing.
So, I think, these are the places where the light would hit.
And, actually, it's more like this in this case.
And that works fine, I think.
I'm going to click on my Layer Blending Mode and change it to Overlay, and bring that down
to about 50%, Ctrl Click on my Layer Mask once again and apply that same mask onto my
new highlight layer.
The next thing I want to do is Ctrl Click on my mask once again, and create a Curves
Layer to give my text a little more contrast.
So I'm going to bring the darker parts lower and the lighter parts a little bit higher,
and create an S Curve.
And I think that's looking pretty good.
And I noticed that there's a little bit of my highlights hitting the background and that's
not looking that well.
So, I'm just going to click on my highlight Layer Mask, set my foreground color to black
and just draw that highlight out.
And, I think, that looks pretty good.
The only thing I'm noticing, now, is that I need to move my bottom kitty texture up
just a little bit more.
I think I brought it out way too much, but I think that works right there.
I'm going to Zoom In just a little bit, and you can now see the strands of hair sticking
out, and there are places that have highlights and shadows, which make everything look good.
I'm going to click on Fit on Screen so we can see the entire effect.
One other thing we need to add is a Drop Shadow.
And if this is real life, the Drop Shadow will be below the text since the light source
is above everything else.
So I'm just going to uncheck Use Global Light, so I can click and drag the shadow without
affecting any of the other layer styles.
It should, actually, be 90, and my size to about 27 or so pixels, so it's pretty blurry;
there's no sharp edge shadows, and set my color to a dark brown, since that's the color
of the background.
I usually like to use the darkest color of the background as my shadow.
I'll press OK, Multiply is fine, 75% looks great, and I'll press OK.
And that is my furry text using a picture of a cat.
As I said before, you can use the picture of a cat, a dog, or any other creature that's
got fur.
That is all for today, ladies and gentlemen.
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