Happy Star Wars Day & How To Make A Star Wars Text Effect In Photoshop

May The Fourth Be With You.  (May 4th)

Today, apparently is Star Wars day so it seems like the ideal time to do a Photoshop tut on how to make a Star Wars type text effect. It’s probably not one you’ll use too often, it’s just for a bit of fun but we’ll be looking at layer effects and blending that you might find useful for other projects.

1. You can download a free set of Star Warsesque fonts called Star Jedi from DaFont.

2. When you’ve installed the fonts, open Photoshop and create a new document with a black background. Mine is 600 x 300 pixels.

3. Add some text and set it in the Stars Wars font. It doesn’t matter what color it is because you’ll put a gradient overlay on it later. Set the text at 150pt high and the leading to 110pt.

4. Right-click on the Text layer in the Layers Palette and choose Convert to Shape. You don’t have to convert to shape, but the reason why we are here is because when we add a Pillow Emboss later, the letters that are joined together (S and T and N and T) will behave as one smooth shape rather than individual letters.

5. Click on the Layer Effects button at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose Gradient Overlay. When the Gradient Overlay dialog box opens up, click on the Gradient in the middle to open the Gradient Editor. On the Gradient Editor click on the triangle in the top right corner to open the Gradient menu. Choose Metals from the pop-up menu. Then click on the “Silver” gradient thumbnail.

6. Set the Angle to 133 degrees. Don’t click OK yet.

You can play around with the settings to get the lighting effects you want. But don’t click OK Yet.

7. Still in the Layer Style dialog box, click on the words Bevel and Emboss on the left hand side. Set the Style to  Pillow Emboss, Depth to 100%, Size and Soften to 2px each. Now click OK.

8. So your text should look suitably futuristic now, something like this.

9. On some of posters for the newer Star Wars movies, the text has a gold tint. To apply a tint make a new layer and name it Tint.

Ctrl + Click on text layer thumbnail to select it.

10. Set the blending mode of the Tint layer to Color and Opacity to about 40%. You can vary the Opacity to change how “golden” the type looks. And that’s it.

Maybe not an effect for everyday, but just a bit of fun for Star Wars day.