Create a Glowing Liquid Text with Water Splash Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create a Glowing Liquid Text Effect in Photoshop. We will be practising the use of liquify filter, layer blending options, as well as some image adjustments.
This is a beginner level tutorial and the steps are easy to follow (well, the hardest part may be the liquify filter usage), have a try!

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

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:
Ground texture
Water pattern image
Water splash brush

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1280px * 800px with black background. Load the Ground Texture stock image into Photoshop, and select a piece of the ground as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection onto our document, use a soft eraser to remove the edges and some parts of the ground as shown below:

Add the following 3 adjustment layers on top of the ground texture layer:
Black and White

Levels

Curves

Create a new layer on top and add some cloud effect over the ground with either a cloud brush or the cloud filter – this adds some dramatic effect into it:

Step 2

We will now add some text onto the document – I used the “Freestyle Script” font (should come with Photoshop):

Apply the following layer blending options to this text layer:
Bevel and Emboss

Color Overlay

Outer Glow

Add a layer mask for the text layer, and use a soft eraser to remove the following parts of the text on this layer mask. And you will have the following effect:

Step 3

We add some water pattern over the text – download the water pattern pack and choose one of the images, select a portion of it with any selection tool:

Copy and paste the selection over the text and set it as a clipping mask to the text layer:

We will go back to the water images and select a piece again, then copy and paste the selection and put it below the text layer, use the liquify filter’s forward warping tool to make it into a pattern as shown below:

This step can be a bit and you will probably need to have a few tries before getting it right. The effect below is the one you’re aiming to achieve:

Step 4

Load the water splash brush into Photoshop and paint some splash around the text, use a soft eraser to fade the edges of the splash for depth:

We will fine tune the colour effect a bit with the following image adjustment layer on top:
Selective Color
Cyans

Whites

Neutrals

Layer mask on the selective colour adjustment layer:

Curves

Layer mask on this curves adjustment layer:

Color Balance


and you will have the following final image: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Till next time, have a great day!

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