This glowing text effect has a cool retro vibe with its colourful halos and blurry outlines,
especially when combined with grainy textures to enhance the low-fi look.
In this tutorial I'll show you how to make it in Photoshop and provide links to the free
assets you need from my Spoon Graphics website.
Open Adobe Photoshop and create a new document.
I'm using dimensions of 3000x2000 pixels.
Fill the background with black using the ALT+Backspace shortcut, then grab the Text tool to lay out
the wording for your artwork.
This effect works well with type or logos, as long as they're single colour graphics
that can be set on the canvas in white.
I'm using this nice fat geometric sans named Roc Grotesk from the Adobe Fonts library,
follow the link in the description to activate it in your Photoshop.
Before adding the glow effects, first let's covert the layer to a Smart Object, so it
can be edited later if necessary.
The main blurry portion of the effect is done using one of the Blur Gallery filters.
Go to Filter > Blur Gallery and choose Field Blur.
Reduce the main, overall blur amount to a low value, just enough so the text no longer
has any crisp outlines.
Click somewhere to place a new blur point, then use the interface widget to adjust the
amount of blur in this specific area.
Add more points elsewhere and adjust the blur amount to add a smudged, out of focus look
to certain parts of the text.
You can fine tune the amount of blur by adjusting the circular interface tool, or move the points
around.
Click OK to apply the field blur filter.
Having the effect applied to a Smart Object means we can edit the settings if we wanted
to.
This step alone gives the text a nice ghost effect, but we can enhance it with some vibrant
colours.
Use the CMD+J shortcut, or CTRL+J on Windows to duplicate the layer twice.
Double click the first duplicate layer and uncheck the Red and Green channels, leaving
just Blue.
Do the same for the second duplicate, but this time leave just the Green channel.
Nudge this layer out of place to create chromatic aberrations or an RGB splitting effect, just
like old CRT screens.
You can actually create different colour combinations by configuring different channels, choosing
Red and Blue instead of green gives a nice pink effect, but green works best when used
with this next gradient map trick.
So add a Gradient Map adjustment layer, then choose two contrasting colours.
Follow the link in the description to download my Free Duotone Gradient Presets for a bunch
of ready-made colour schemes to choose from.
Set this Gradient Map's blending mode to Hue.
You can see how different colour combinations provide vibrant gradients.
I like this number 34 duotone preset best.
If you select the original text layer and reduce its fill value, it brings in more of
the brightest colour from the gradient map, rather than it being bright white.
You can also go back and adjust any of those Field Blur effects to reconfigure the blurriness
now you can see how the colours interact with it.
Alternatively, you could also add more blur effects with a Gaussian Blur or Motion Blur
to spread out the gradient colours further.
Another way to add interesting smudge and blur effects is to use the CMD+T shortcut
for Transform, then right click and select Warp.
Bend and disfigure one of the text layers so it bleeds off in different directions.
That's the main glowing text effect complete, but no Spoon Graphics tutorial is complete
without some nice grainy texturing.
Add a new layer to the top of the layer stack, then go to Edit > Fill.
Choose 50% grey.
Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set it up with 50% Amount, Gaussian and Monochromatic.
Add a Gaussian Blur filter of just 1px, then set this layer's blending mode to Vivid Light,
Reduce the Fill value to bring down the prominence of the grain.
Around 25% adds a nice subtle touch of noise.
Download an open a couple of my free texture packs from Spoon Graphics.
The Dirty Surface Textures and Film Dust Textures packs.
Choose your favourites and open them in Photoshop.
Select All with CMD+A, Copy with CMD+C, Close with CMD+W.
In the main document, select the background layer and Paste with CMD+V.
Reduce the fill value to tone down the texture, then add a film dust texture for more grainy
details.
The Film Dust texture will also need scaling to size with CMD+T, then the blending mode
set to Screen so it interacts with the Dirty Surface Texture below.
The addition of these textures really helps to enhance the retro, low-fi look.
Don't forget that because we created a Smart Object, the original text can be altered.
Double click the smart object thumbnail to open its contents
It might be necessary to enlarge the canvas area to make room to edit the text.
Save and close the Smart Object PSB file to see the effect has been updated with the new
wording.
Of course you can also edit those blur settings to suit too.