How to Create a Powerful Text Portrait In Photoshop 2021

In today’s video, we’re going to create a clever text portrait in Photoshop where a passage of text bends and warps to form the contours of the subject’s face. The process uses just a small selection of Photoshop’s tools, with the Displace filter and a clipping mask being the key ingredients to making the effect.

So we’re gonna start off with this image that’s on the screen right now, and we’re going to put a text layer over this image. I have some text here, and what I need to do is spread this text layer out over the whole image. I wanna spread this text layer out, increase the font, so it should look something like this.

So this text should be clean and condensed, you don’t want any fonts that are outrageous. You don’t need a script fonts, just some nice plain text. It’s going to look better if it’s legible, and you want the distortion not to come from the text or the script, but from the effect.

So this is our main image, we’re gonna need two images. So I’m gonna save this image out to my computer. And I’m gonna call it modelimage2start.

Preparing the Bump Map – Text Portrait in Photoshop

And now we need another image. And that image is our bump map. So I’m going to save this image out to my computer. And I’m gonna call this model2imagestartbump. But on this image here, I don’t need the text. So I’m gonna delete that, and I’m just gonna create another layer right here.

So I just need two images, my original image, and my bump map. So what is the bump map? Well, there’s a lot of in-depth explanations of what this is, but basically, a bump map will give you the illusion of depth. So in our case, we’re gonna use the bump map, where this bump file is the input to the displace filter. This is gonna help with the bending of the text around different areas of the face.

So let’s work on the bump map image. For the bump map image, we want to make it a great image. So we have two layers here, I’m gonna make this top layer a smart object. And I’m going to come up here to image adjustments, hue saturation. And I’m gonna take the saturation all the way down to -100, making that a gray or black and white image. Click okay.

And so if we look at the image if the image was a face like this, and there was a lot of texture in the skin, you could actually smooth some of that out, which is this effect. And we’re going to come up here to filter, camera raw filter. And in the camera raw filter we can bring the texture all the way over to the left and that will really smooth it out. And if you wanted to you can adjust the clarity. But this is really made her skin really smooth. And I’m gonna say okay, camera raw is working, and there we go.

Next, I’m going to make a new layer here. And I’m gonna call this layer here, gray, this top layer here, I’m gonna call it blur, ’cause we are going to blur this layer. I’m going to use filter, blur, gaussian blur, and I’m going to bring up this blur. Are you good here, maybe not that high, something like that. Say, okay.

And now on this blur there, I wanna add a layer mask, and paint with black on the layer mask. B for the brush tool, bring my brush up a little bit, and I’m just gonna paint in the areas of her face and bring back lips, the nose, the eyes, pretty much to the center of the face. And so you have everything else around the face that is blurry. Now I’m gonna save my bump map.

Using the Bump Map with the Distort Filter – Text Portrait in Photoshop

So now we’ve prepared our bump map file, let’s work on our original image now. So now with the text layer selected, we’re going to displace the text layer with a filter, we’re gonna come up here to filter, distort and displace. And we’re being prompted to either cancel, rasterize or convert to smart object. We wanna convert to smart object. So the text layer is now a smart object. And now we have parameters for our displace, this horizontal and vertical scale has to do with the way that detects bends around the face and different areas, the hands, so it’s actually how much detects will be distorted.

So if you go too high with this horizontal and vertical scale, the edges or the words are going to really be jagged. So you have to play with it. Maybe 20 is the maximum but you may have to do this a couple of times, and for the displacement map, stretch to fit is probably something that you will always use if your original photo and your bump map is the same size. So I’m gonna say okay, and now it’s gonna come to my file system, and I am going to select the file, that is my bump map. Say open, it is working.

So I may be able to increase this because I’m looking at my text and how it is wrapping around the different areas of the face, I might be able to go up to 15, let’s see. Command + Z to undo that, and I’m gonna come up, here again, to filter, distort, displace, convert to smart object, and this time I’m gonna try 15, both horizontal and vertical scale. Say okay, it prompts me to navigate to where my bump file is, it’s working, I think that’s a little better. You can see areas where it is wrapping around areas of the face and the hands. So I’m gonna go with 15 in this case, so that’s what I mean, you have to play with it a little bit. I’m gonna save this file in text portrait in Photoshop.

Changing Blend Modes – Text Portrait in Photoshop

So now we’re gonna take this to the next level. I’m gonna duplicate this bottom layer here, Command + J, and I’m gonna put it above the text layer. And so now we can change the blend modes, and we can go through all of these just to see what looks best, you see that multiply makes everything darker, and you can just bring your cursor down to each of these blend modes to see what you like. It’s really what you like, overlay might be good, soft light, hard light, I kind of like pin light right now.

One thing that you could do, if the head was earned one way or the other, you could rotate the text to match the angle of the head. But in this case, her head is pretty level, so we’ll keep the text there for this text portrait in Photoshop.

Let’s Get Advanced – Text Portrait in Photoshop

But now let’s get a little bit more advanced. I’m gonna duplicate this top layer, Command + J, and the layer just above the text, I’m going to clip it to the layer below by holding down the Alt or Option, I’m gonna make this top layer invisible. And on that layer that I have clipped to the text layer, I’m gonna put back to normal. So I actually wanna make the layer of the subject a little bit darker.

So I’m gonna come down to the bottom layer, layer zero, I’m gonna add a new layer, and I am going to fill it with black. And this is even another effect. So now we’re just revealing the photo where we have the text with the displacement map. I don’t want to cover her up completely, so, this is where you can get even more creative and change opacity. So I’m on this layer that I added, the blank layer that I filled with black, and I’m gonna bring down the opacity, say 40-ish. So I wanna make her come through a little bit more, zoom in here so you can see. So now what we have this different looking effect for a text portrait in Photoshop

We can still take this further. We have this top layer up here, and we’re going to enable that, and I’m going to put a layer mask on it and I am going to invert that layer mask, Command + I to invert it, making it a black layer mask. And the almond paint with white over her eyes and her lips, it kind of bring those colors back in, they’re making her eyes top a little bit more, and her lips, and something like that. And as you can see, in the image, all around the different parts of the face, the text is bending in and out in between different facial features and the hand. Text portrait in Photoshop.

See the previous article here 👉 https://charlescabrera.com/change-color-in-photoshop-with-hue-saturation/

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