Making a Grungy Text - By DeeZeL
Introduction: Okay, in this tutorial you are going to learn how to make 'grungy' style text. Grunge designs are those designs which mainly deal with dark colors and sharp objects, and one of the most vital elements in a grunge design is, well the text. What is meant by a grungy text is that kinda of text that looks like a 'worn' out object, in order to
match the grunge theme of the design. Now that you have a good idea
about what a grungy text is, here's how you can do it:
1. Create a new document with a white back ground, in my case I created
a 400x400 document.
2. I typed the text 'Oman3d' with a basic font that you will surely find in your photoshop font list, the font is an 'Arial Black' font with a size of 72 pt.
3. After you are done typing the text, right click the text layer and click on 'rasterize layer'. Be careful, once the text layer is rasterized you cannot modify it using the text tool, but you can always use the history tab to go back a few steps.
4. Now we will leave our text image for a while and open another image, any image. In my case I used an image I found on a google search, you can use it for practice.
5. Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves (or simply press CTRL + M ) in order to bring up the curves window.
6. Now play with the curves a little bit, as you may notice that the look of the image itself will change, it will become 'darker' and more messy; that's exactly what we want, so it is ok.
* Optional steps *
Just for the sake of more 'sharper' feel of the grunge brush, I made those two optional steps. Meaning that you safely can skip ahead to step 9, although I highly recommend it.
7. Now go to the Select > Color Range menu (make sure your press 'D' before doing so in order to guarantee that your foreground color is black and the background color is white). The Color Range window by default will have all the settings we need, so just press OK.
8. Now, all the black areas in your image should be highlighted by now, all you have to do is to press CTRL+C in order to copy your selection, press CTRL+N in order to create a new document (leave the dimensions alone, they are set by default to the canvas size you just copied). After you do so, paste the image (CTRL+V) to your new canvas, here
is what you should come up with:
Then, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, you should have a window similar to this one:
* Optional steps completed *
9. Now, back to our good ol' OMAN3D image; select the Eraser tool (hotkey: 'E'), and move to the tool bar from where you will find a drop down menu for you to select brushes from, select the destruction brush (by default, it will be the the last brush in the list).
10. Now just press ONCE anywhere on the image, and voila...here it is.
Now that you have done with it, continue practicing this technique on some other stuff, the 'destruction' brush we created can be used in lots of grungy works. Hope this tutorial was helpful .
- End of Tutorial