Frozen Text Effect

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hey everyone, Howard Pinsky here with a very cool Photoshop tutorial.
• 00:08 Today I will be showing you guys how to create a text effect that's similar to the
• 00:11 text in Disney's new movie, Frozen.
• 00:13 I'm not going to show you how to create the font, because I believe that's
• 00:17 copyrighted by Disney.
• 00:18 But I can show you how to create text that is similar, using layer styles
• 00:22 and textures. Let me show you exactly how this works.
• 00:25 This text effect is going to be composed using layer styles,
• 00:29 and some textures. I'll be using two textures which I grabbed from
• 00:32 Shutterstock.com.
• 00:34 Of course, if you don't have a Shutterstock account you can probably grab similar
• 00:37 free textures from CGtextures.com.
• 00:38 Starting off the background, this will set the
• 00:42 stage for our text, and a little bit of texture as well.
• 00:45 I'll start by filling in my background with a dark navy blue,
• 00:48 and then I’m going to add in one of my textures. Once the texture's in place,
• 00:53 to blend it in with the background, setting the blend mode to multiply
• 00:57 should dampen it down quite a bit. But I do want to strengthen up the contrast
• 01:00 just a little bit.
• 01:01 To do that, I'll add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer from the bottom
• 01:05 of the layers panel,
• 01:06 and then clip it to the texture layer by placing my cursor
• 01:09 in between the two layers, and then with my ALT or Option key held down, click.
• 01:12 Once the adjustment layer has been clipped to the texture,
• 01:16 I'll decrease the brightness to around -40 and then increase the contrast
• 01:21 to around +40. Finally, to finish off the background, I'll add a slight
• 01:26 highlight.
• 01:26 Creating one more new layer, I'll switch over to a large, soft white brush,
• 01:31 and then add a single spot around the top right corner of this document.
• 01:35 Now, obviously this is way too harsh. To blend in with the background, I can
• 01:40 change the blend mode to soft light,
• 01:42 and then decrease the opacity until I'm happy: perfect.
• 01:46 Now we can start with the text.
• 01:47 Like I mentioned, we're not going to be recreating the font that Disney used,
• 01:50 as I'm sure it was custom created for the movie. So, we're going to be using something
• 01:54 a little bit more generic.
• 01:55 Grabbing my type tool from the Tools bar on the left, the font I will be using will
• 01:59 be Trojan Pro:
• 02:00 set to bold and the color will be a lighter blue.
• 02:07 The color of
• 02:11 your text is very important, as the texture that we're about to add is going
• 02:14 to be interacting with it when we change the blend mode.
• 02:16 Now, once the properties are set, I'm going to type out the word frozen in the center of
• 02:21 this document.
• 02:21 Now, we can start applying a few layer styles to give our text a bit of shape.
• 02:26 The first one that we're going to be adding will be a bevel and emboss.
• 02:29 The style of the bevel will be kept at inner bevel,
• 02:32 but the technique will be changed to ‘chisel soft’, then setting the direction
• 02:36 to down
• 02:38 and maxing out the size will give us the shape that we’re looking for.
• 02:41 Next, down below under shading, to give our text a little bit of shine,
• 02:45 change the gloss contour to ‘half round’ and then pull it back a bit, just a touch,
• 02:50 by decreasing the altitude to 10 degrees
• 02:52 Finally, change the shadow mode to soft light
• 02:56 and then decrease the opacity to 45%.
• 02:59 Next, to add a bit of glow to the inside of the text,
• 03:03 we're going to be adding an inner glow. The blend mode can be kept at screen,
• 03:07 but decrease the opacity to around 55%, and then
• 03:11 increase the size until you see a nice, subtle glow on the inside the text:
• 03:15 around 25 pixels should do. Good. The last layer style we're going to be adding will be an
• 03:20 outer glow.
• 03:21 The blend mode will be switched over to soft light, the opacity will be increased
• 03:26 to 100%,
• 03:27 and the color will be set to white. Now, down below, crank
• 03:30 up the size to create a nice soft glow behind our text.
• 03:34 Perfect. Our layer styles are now complete. But, our texture isn't looking very
• 03:38 cold.
• 03:39 This is where our second texture comes into play. Let me hop over to the
• 03:42 document that contains my second texture.
• 03:44 I'm going to drag it right over to the text document, so it sits above our text
• 03:49 layer.
• 03:49 We need to clip it so it’s confined inside the text. Just like when we clipped
• 03:53 our adjustment layer to our texture,
• 03:55 hold your ALT or Option key and then place your cursor in between the two
• 03:59 layers and click.
• 03:59 Perfect. Finally, to blend in the texture a little bit better,
• 04:04 set the blend mode too hard light. That should give you a nice
• 04:07 vibrant look to your texture. That's looking quite a bit better,
• 04:10 but the edges of our text are looking a little bit too straight.
• 04:14 To deal with this, we'll be applying distortion to a layer mask.
• 04:18 So, with your computer Control key held down, click on your type layer's thumbnail
• 04:21 to turn it into a selection.
• 04:23 Then, add a layer mask at the bottom of the Layers panel. This will give us a
• 04:26 border to apply our filter to.
• 04:29 And now that the mask is in place, let’s add the wave distortion.
• 04:32 It is in the filter distort menu. In terms of the settings,
• 04:36 I found that using a triangular type gave me the best results,
• 04:39 with the generator set around 22, the max
• 04:42 wavelength to around 70, and the max amplitude at 2.
• 04:46 When you press OK, you're going to see that the edges of the text are now
• 04:50 cracked and chipped.
• 04:51 And because you applied this filter to a layer mask, you can add even more filters if you want
• 04:55 more cracks around the text.
• 04:56 Or, if you want to go back to your smooth text, you can disable the layer mask
• 04:59 quite easily.
• 05:01 And that does it. Your own frozen text effect in Photoshop, using layer styles
• 05:05 and a texture.

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