Luminous Glass Text Effect

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Luminous Glass Text Effect

Sweet glass type with just two layers. You’re gonna want to check this one out.

This glass is so cool it gives off its own light. That’s what we’re going for in today’s tutorial, so lets jump into it.

Any background will work great with this. I’m using a simple blue pattern that’ll show off the glass’s transparency.

Can’t go wrong with a font called Ballpark Weiner. Slap on a text layer and duplicate it. Then hide your top text layer.

Set your Fill Opacity to 0% and start applying these layer effects to this bottom text layer. We’re using lots of subtle shading with different blending modes and Contours to really make this bevel glow. The stroke adds a nice highlighted edge, but it’s completely optional. Don’t be afraid to test different settings or colors.
Looks neat. But it’s about to get 10 times more awesome. Un-hide your top text layer and apply the next round of layer effects. This top layer creates the slick spectacular highlight and another soft shadow. Take note of the Fill Opacity — this time we just want to crank it down to 20%.

How’s that for some glass? But with this much light refracting in the type, you’d expect there to be some light spilling on to our background. We’ll make this happen with a soft brush. So create a new layer underneath your text and press Ctrl + G to group it. Why are we grouping this one layer? Because we want to change the blending mode of the group to Color Dodge. This is a quick workaround to dodging a transparent layer with white brush strokes. Now hold down Ctrl and click one of your text layers to select it. With your empty color dodged layer selected, click the Add layer mask icon in the bottom of your Layers palette and then do a Ctrl + I to invert the mask. You’re ready to start dodging. Use a soft white brush, about 45px in size and 15% flow, and make some gentle strokes in front of the glass’s highlights. You can tone down the layer’s opacity (80%) if things get a little too bright. Have a look at what I came up with (text layers hidden):

And there you have it, a quick glass text effect that looks like it was rendered out of an expensive 3d program. It’ll be our secret.