Hairy Text Effect

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hey, everyone.
• 00:04 Howard Pinsky here with a very hairy Photoshop tutorial.
• 00:08 I've been asked many times to create a tutorial on how to achieve furry text.
• 00:13 So, let me go ahead and show you a super simple way of doing just that.
• 00:17 There are three things that you're going to need to complete this tutorial.
• 00:20 First is your text.
• 00:22 Second is some sort of texture,
• 00:23 like this leopard fur which I found over at ShutterStock.
• 00:26 And third is a customized brush, which we're gonna look at shortly.
• 00:30 In terms of the text, the font in size is completely up to you.
• 00:34 But, from my experience, using a thicker font, like the one you see here,
• 00:38 tends to work best, especially if you're going to be working with layer styles.
• 00:42 Next is the texture.
• 00:43 Over at Shutterstock I found a really nice,
• 00:46 high quality image of leopard fur which are gonna work great for this effect.
• 00:50 Now when you're placing your texture on top of the text,
• 00:53 you wanna make sure that's quite a bit bigger on all sides.
• 00:56 So the bigger the texture the better.
• 00:58 But at the same time, you probably wanna include as many of the spots as possible,
• 01:03 so you may wanna scale it downwards, if it's a little bit too large.
• 01:07 Now the simple solution to this effect would be to right-click on
• 01:10 the Texture layer in your Layers panel and create a Clipping Mask.
• 01:13 Which would place that texture inside of the text and allow you to move it around.
• 01:18 If this is what you're looking for, then great.
• 01:20 However, if you want a more hairy effect, let's back up a step and
• 01:24 forget about the Clipping Mask.
• 01:25 Instead, we're gonna be working with a Layer Mask, which is
• 01:28 gonna give us a little more flexibility when it comes to adding the hair.
• 01:32 To add a Layer Mask, first hold down your Cmd key on the Mac, Ctrl key on Windows,
• 01:37 and then click on the text layer's thumbnail to turn it into a selection.
• 01:41 Once a selection has been made, with the texture layer still active,
• 01:44 click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of your Layers panel.
• 01:48 The result should look identical to when we used the Clipping mask.
• 01:51 But because we now have the ability to easily hide or
• 01:54 show portions of the texture layer, we can use a custom brush to add in the hair.
• 01:59 And to do that, let's turn to our Brushes.
• 02:02 Pressing your B key will quickly activate your Brush tool,
• 02:05 which you can also find in your Tools bar to the left.
• 02:07 Now at the top on your options bar, you're gonna find your brush picker,
• 02:11 which includes many of the brushes that come with Photoshop.
• 02:14 However the brush that we want to use isn't available by default.
• 02:18 Clicking on the gear icon at the top right corner will reveal the preset packs that
• 02:22 can be loaded in.
• 02:24 DP Brushes is what we're looking for.
• 02:26 These brushes were created by Daniel Presedo on the Photoshop team.
• 02:29 And until this week, I had no idea what DP stood for.
• 02:32 That's one mystery of life solved.
• 02:34 So when this window pops up,
• 02:35 pressing a pen will add Daniel's brushes to the bottom of your current list.
• 02:39 The brush that we're going to start with will be DP Crackle,
• 02:42 which should be the second last brush in the picker.
• 02:45 You also wanna make sure that the mode is set to Normal, and that the Opacity and
• 02:50 Flow are both set to 100%.
• 02:52 Now I mentioned at the beginning that we're gonna need a customized brush.
• 02:55 For an effect like this using any of the brushes as they are will not give us
• 02:59 a believable result.
• 03:01 So to customize a brush in Photoshop, you're gonna wanna open the brush panel,
• 03:05 which you can find under the Window menu at the top.
• 03:08 Once it's visible, in the Brush Tip Shape section, go ahead and decrease the brush
• 03:13 size to around 70 pixels and the spacing to around 25 percent.
• 03:17 Now it's good to know that if you're starting with a larger or
• 03:19 smaller font, you may want to experiment with these settings to
• 03:22 get the result that you're looking for.
• 03:25 Next let's hop into Shape Dynamics.
• 03:27 To give some variation to the size of the hairs, go ahead and
• 03:30 crack up the size jitter to a 100% and keep the minimum diameter at 0.
• 03:35 Now to also give some variation to the angle of the hairs,
• 03:38 increase the angle jitter to around 10% and then set the control at Direction.
• 03:43 This will allow the brush to rotate as it's being drawn around the letters.
• 03:48 Lastly, increasing the Roundness Jitter will also help move away from
• 03:51 a repeating design, 100% should work well.
• 03:55 All right, the customization is complete.
• 03:57 Nothing too complex.
• 03:58 But if you think you may wanna use this brush for
• 04:00 future designs, it may be a good idea to save it.
• 04:03 Pressing the new brush icon at the bottom will allow you to name and
• 04:07 save your brush.
• 04:08 Perfect.
• 04:09 Now it's time to brush in the hairs,
• 04:11 because we're working with a Layer Mask anything that is currently hidden can be
• 04:15 easily revealed by painting in with a white brush.
• 04:18 So make sure that your foreground color is set to white, and paint away.
• 04:24 Now clearly there has to be a better way, right?
• 04:26 This will take ages.
• 04:28 Okay there is.
• 04:29 There's an option within Photoshop that can allow you to brush along a path and
• 04:33 luckily we can easily create a path from existing text.
• 04:37 If you right-click on your Type Layer in your Layers panel
• 04:40 selecting the Create Work Path option will create a path from your text.
• 04:44 It may be hard to see, but you should see a very thin line around your letters,
• 04:48 that's your path which you can easily hide or show with your command or
• 04:51 Ctrl+Shift+H shortcut.
• 04:53 Now in the process of creating that path your text layer was probably made active.
• 04:59 Before you move on, make sure that not only are the texture layer active, but
• 05:03 make sure that its Layer Mask is active as well.
• 05:05 If you see a frame surrounding the mask, you're in good shape.
• 05:09 So now that we have a path to brush on, go ahead and
• 05:12 grab your Pen Tool, shortcut key P, and right-click anywhere on the path.
• 05:17 A few options down, select Stroke Path.
• 05:20 These are the tools that we can use on our Path.
• 05:22 But as we've been customizing a brush, we're gonna stick with the Brush option.
• 05:26 And we're gonna make sure to keep Simulate Pressure off so
• 05:29 that the opacity is even throughout the design.
• 05:32 Once you press OK,
• 05:33 you're gonna see a few hairs have been added to the outside of the text.
• 05:36 It's a good start, but it needs more.
• 05:39 Here is a neat trick, now that we have told Photoshop what to
• 05:42 use to stroke the path, hop back over to your brush tool, shortcut key B, and
• 05:46 simply press Return or Enter on your keyboard to repeat that stroke.
• 05:51 Keep pressing Return or Enter a few times until you are happy with the density of
• 05:54 the hair, 5 or 6 times should give you nice results.
• 05:58 That is looking much better.
• 05:59 Now finally, depending on the texture that you used,
• 06:02 you may want to Blur the mask ever so slightly.
• 06:05 I'm gonna add a very subtle Gaussian blur of around 0.3 pixels,
• 06:09 just to soften out the hairs a touch.
• 06:11 And the last thing you might want to do is to add a very slight Inner Shadow to
• 06:15 the Texture Layer to add some depth, but it's completely optional.
• 06:19 And that should do it.
• 06:20 A fairly simple way to create hairy text in Photoshop.

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