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Home » Photoshop tutorials » Weathered text


Weathered textPrinter Friendly

A very cool, and often used effect on text is the weathered look.
It's great for use on t-shirts, as graffiti on walls in pictures or as printed text on old photographs or newspapers.
But how do you get that effect quickly?
The following tutorial will not explain every possible way to do certain things (such as creating new layers).

Keyboard shortcuts are given for Windows users only. Mac users: alt = option, ctrl = command.

Start by pressing D to reset the default foreground and background colors ().
Now make a new canvas as in the screenshot below:


Add text to the canvas by selecting the Text tool (T - ) and clicking on the canvas.
Next, select the Move tool (V - ) and open the Character panel (Window > Character)
Select a font of your chosing. I'm using Times New Roman in Bold style, and set the text color to black.


Hit Ctrl + T on your keyboard to go into Free Transform mode and position the text roughly in the center of the canvas, stretching it to fill most of the available space.


Now create a new layer (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N or Layer > New > New Layer)
Fill this layer with white by pressing Ctrl + Backspace.
Go to Filter > Render > Fibres and randomize a few times. Change the settings as you like them, but make sure there's enough variation in the resulting image.




Select all (Ctrl + A) and copy (Ctrl + C), then hide Layer 1.
Select the text layer and add a layer mask.
Alt-click on the layer mask thumbnail.
Press Ctrl + V followed by Ctrl + D to paste the fibres onto the mask and deselect the image.


Alt-click on the layer mask thumbnail again to see the result.

To check the transparency you can select the Background layer and fill it with a different color (I used red).


You may find the weathered effect too much. To remedy this, select the layer mask again.
Then go to Image > Adjustments > Levels (Ctrl + L).




In the Levels dialog you will most likely achieve the desired result by moving the midtones and highlights sliders to the left a little.
If this doesn't give the correct result, you can always render fibres on the layer mask again, using different settings, and then adjusting the mask using levels.

When you're done, you can still alter the text color, font and size without having to redo any of the steps. You can even add layer styles as I did in the image below (I added a stroke)