Create Chilling Ice Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the process of creating this chilling ice text effect in Photoshop. We will learn several useful method of applying texture onto your texts, as well as various effect creation such as cloud, particles and lighting adjustments.
This is an immediate level tutorial and some steps can be a little tricky, have a try!

Note: The Photoshop tutorial is done in CS6 – therefore some screenshot may have slighting different layout as in the earlier version. Some brushes are exclusive to Photoshop CS6.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:
Wall Texture
Font
Ice Texture 1
Ice Texture 2

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 700px with black background. Load the wall texture into Photoshop, select a portion and paste it onto our document:

Use a soft eraser to remove the following parts of the wall texture:

Apply the following 2 image adjustment layers on top of the wall texture layer:
Black and White

Levels

and here is the effect so far – as you can see, only the centre portion is visible after we apply the adjustment layers:

We will use this as a base for our text.

Step 2

We will work on our texts and start applying the ice texture in this step. Use the font you downloaded, type some letters onto the canvas:

Load the “ice texture 1″ image into Photoshop, select the text layer and move the selection over to this texture and copy the selection:

Paste the texture back onto the texts and cover them as shown below:

Apply the following 2 adjustment layers as clipping masks to this ice texture layer:
Black and White

Levels

Repeat the above step and grab another piece of the ice texture:

Paste it onto our document and set it as a clipping mask to the “Levels” adjustment layer you added just now:

Change the blending mode of this second ice texture layer to “Hard Light”, and apply the following image adjustments:
Black and White

Levels

and here is the effect you will have so far:

Step 3

We will add some extra ice blocks onto our image in this step. Load the “ice texture 2″ image into Photoshop and select one triangle piece:

Copy and paste it behind our text layer, reduce its size as shown below:

Repeat the above step and add a few more ice blocks onto our document:

Step 4

We will add some extra effect onto our image with the “ice texture 2″. Grab a piece from this stock image and copy it over to our document, resize it as shown below:

Apply the following adjustments to this compressed image:
Black and White

Levels

Change the layer blending mode of this layer to “Screen”:

and you will have the following effect:

Use a soft eraser to fade the edges of this layer:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 5

We will add some flying ice blocks to the image. Again we grab a piece from the “ice texture 2″ image:

Copy and paste the selection over to our document, resize it to a smaller scale:

Use the blur tool to blur it a bit to add some dynamics to the image:

Repeat the above step and add a few more pieces in, make sure you vary the size and angle of each ice layer:

Step 6

We’re almost done! For some final adjustments, I put a curves adjustment layers on top to add some colours:




I also added some cloud into the image with a cloud brush, and here is my final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy going through it and find it useful. Drop me a comment below if you have any question.
Till next time, have a great day!

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