Picture Text Effect (Exclusive Tutorial)

Very often you need to add some text to a picture: to sign a photo, to label images, etc. There are a lot of Text Effects tutorials. However, they are all for certain texts and the aim of this tutorial is to give you the consecutive steps to save texts to a certain image. I decided to experiment with the following picture:

Using Text tool (T) write something on the sunflower. Open the Window>Character panel and insert these settings:

I've chosen this font and made it strong so that the text has an unusual look.

Next fill the background of the with black and merge it with the text layer (Ctrl+E). Use the Gaussian Blur Filter (>Blur>Gaussian Blur) with 2px value.

Save this image as 1.psd. Come back in the history to the moment when you painted the background black.

Duplicate the layer with the background (Ctrl+J) and use the Displace filter (Filter>Distort>Displace) with the following settings:

To see the saved image before 1.psd. The result must be like this:

Ctrl+click on the background layer to make a selection, and after that choose the layer where you have used the Displace Filter and click the button "Add Layer Mask" in the Layers Palette (or Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal Selection). The text background can be removed or hidden. You should get the following result:

Now go to Blending Options for the layer where you have used the Displacement Filter and set the following values:

Here's what I've got :

Click to enlarge

You can also move the text to a different place using the Move tool, and it remains suitable for the picture because its color spectrum fits with the picture.

Click to enlarge