Tutorial:  Making text look "painted" on an object.

There have been some questions recently about how to achieve the effect of text appearing to be "painted" on an object in an image.  Although other tutorials for this are out on the Web, they don't explain why certain steps are done, so I decided to try my hand at it.  I also added some steps for colourizing the text, if you don't want to use plain black or white text.

So, here goes!

1. Make all your size and cropping adjustments to the colour image and save it as "Image colour.psd".  You will need two images, one in colour and one in Black & White that are exact matches for size and cropping, so do your cropping now.
   
2. Use Enhance...Convert to Black and White to convert to B&W and adjust the Contrast.  For this image I used "Vivid Landscape" and increasted the Contrast slightly to +20.  It's better to use a B&W image as the Displacement Map because the displacement is more obvious than when using a colour image as the Displacement Map.  Boosting the Contrast also helps the displacement be more obvious.
3. Use Filter...Blur...Gaussian Blur with a setting of 1.5 pixels.  Adding a slight blur helps prevent the edges of the displaced text from breaking up.
4. Use "Save As" to save this B&W image as "Image BW.psd".
   
5. Close "Image BW.psd".
6. Re-open "Image colour.psd".
7. Use the Text tool to enter your text.  Then adjust its size and position.
   
8. Select the Text layer and add a Hue/Saturation layer.  Adjust the sliders to suit, selecting "Colorize" and making sure you click the icon to clip this H/S adjustment layer to the Text layer so only the text is affected.
   
   
   At this point, your layers will look like this:
   
9. Select the Text layer and choose Filter...Distort...Displace.  You'll get a message that the text layer must be simplified.  Clicking "OK" means that the text will no longer be editable as text, so make sure your text is spelled correctly!
10. You'll then get the Displacement Map settings dialog.  Use these settings as a start.
    
11. Click "OK", and in the file selection dialog box, select your "Image BW.psd" file.
12. If you don't like the effect, hit the "Undo" button, re-select your Text layer, and try different amounts of displacement.  Keep repeating until you're happy with the result:
    
13. Once you have the text displaced, you'll probably want to adjust the Hue/Saturation and the layer opacity to get the text to really look like it's painted on the object.
    
    

Here's the final result (with apologies to Frank Zappa ):

That's it -- have some fun!

Ken