Create realistic type on wood

In this tutorial we are going to take some regular text and add some effects to make it look like it has been painted or printed on wood. This is a great way to give your text that natural look. This can be applied to any solid shape, text, images, logos, etc.

What we are going to need

Adobe Photoshop

Wood Texture

Step 1

Open up the wood texture from Zen Textures in Photoshop.

Go to Image>Image Size and change the width to 1200px and make sure the resolution is at 72 pixels/inch. This will give us the width that we want for our document.

Step 2

Using the Type Tool (T), create some white text that will roughly fit the width of the document (leaving some space on the edges). I am using ITC Franklin Gothic Heavy for my font, but anything bold should work.

Using the Crop Tool (C) crop the top and bottom edges so they have a small margin around the text, about the same amount as the sides or a little more.

Step 3

Click on the eye icon to the left of the text layer to make the text disappear.

Go to File>Save, and save it as a Photoshop file. We are going to be using this file later on in the tutorial.

Step 4

Make sure you have the background layer selected. We are going to duplicate the layer with Ctrl+J.

Now go to Image>Adjustments>Threshold. Make your threshold level around 70.

Step 5

Go into Select>Color Range, and make sure your fuzziness is at 200. Now with the eyedropper click on a black part of the document and hit OK. A marquee around all the black areas should come up.

Step 6

We want to get the inverse of our selection, so to do that we are going to do Ctrl+Shift+I Now we can click on the text layer and click on Add Vector Mask.

Click on the eye icon next to the text layer to bring it back (if it isn’t already), and click on the eye icon next to the black and white wood layer to make it go away.

Step 7

If we zoom in we will notice that the masked out parts are too sharp to be believable, compared to the sharpness of the wood. To fix this we are going to go into Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Change the blur to about 0.4px.

Step 8

Now we want to make the edges look a little more believable. First we need to make the mask and the layer just one regular layer, so right-click on the layer and click on Rasterize Layer. Now Right-click on the mask and click on Apply Layer Mask.

Now go to Filter>Distort>Displace and change the horizontal and vertical scales both to 2, click OK. A file browser should come up. Open up the file we saved in the beginning of the tutorial.

If you zoom in you’ll notice the edges follow the lines on the wood background.

Step 9

Drop the opacity of the text down to 80% to give the white part a subtle groove that the wood has.

Step 10

Now we are going to add some lighting effects to our document to make it look a little more interesting.

First off, lets create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) and move it above the text layer. Click on the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) and change the feather to 75px. Now click and drag a circle around the text.

Step 11

We are going to get the inverse selection (Ctrl+Shift+I) of

the circle and fill it with black. Change the blend mode to Soft Light.

Step 12

Create another new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N), above the text

layer and the shadow one we just created. Create a circle around the text like

we did in step 10 and fill it with an orange color (something like #FF9B0B).

Change the blend mode to Soft Light and the opacity to 50%.

Step 13

Finally we are going to give our document an overall orange glow. Make sure your foreground is the orange that we used in the previous step and the background is black. Now go into “Create new or fill adjustment layer” (this middle icon at the bottom of the layers palette) and click on Gradient Map. The foreground and background colors should make a black to orange gradient for us. Make sure you click on reverse and click ok.