Displacement Mapping in Photoshop
Jan 10, 2009 Photoshop, Text Effects, Web Graphics
This tutorial has been viewed: 5121 times
We are going to be creating an image like below using a technique called displacement mapping.
tip
A displacement map allows you to wrap images or other content over a background image so they blend in with it
First off you are going to need to download the water background used in the tutorial in a .psd format, click Here to Download
now you are to need two documents with the water background in them so just copy the water texture, create a new document of the same size and paste it in that new document. While you are in the new
tip
Guassian Blur blends the document together so that when we do our displacement effect it wont be so drastic.
document go to filter > guassian blur and set the setting to about 1.0
Now go to File > Save and save that document (in .psd format) wherever you want on your hard-drive just remember where you save it too. Now go back to the other document, (without the gaussian blur) and type in whatever text you want, it’s best if you use a font that is thick and set to bold, below I used Placard Condensed, set to Bold, and at 72pt font you can use
tip
Having trouble getting the font size right? press ctrl+t with the text layer selected to get that font size just right!
whatever font you think looks cool though.
Now you need to Rasterize the text layer, Right click on the Layer with your text on it
tip
What Rasterizing does is basically make the text layer exactly like any other layer so you can do filters to it, you cannot edit text after you rasterize it.
and choose Rasterize Layer.
Now we are going to use the .psd file we saved earlier, first with the rasterized text layer selected go to Filter > Distort > Displace use the following settings
When it asks you to select a file, select the .psd file you saved earlier then press ok, if all goes well you should come out with this
Set the blending mode of that layer to Overlay and apply the following style settings to the layer
Which should result in
Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!
Tags: photoshop
January 10th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Thanks for reading the tutorial, please leave some feedback!
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January 10th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
I really liked the tutorial!
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January 10th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
testing of comments
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February 16th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
thanks !! very helpful post!
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June 12th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Way cool!
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June 13th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Wow, this is a great tutorial. Thank you for doing this.
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May 8th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Very cool effect. Thanks for sharing
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