Opal Text in Photoshop

Opals are beautiful and wouldn’t it be fine to be able to write with them? Of course, you can go on the internet and use a picture of an opal, but we can make our own opal in Photoshop with a combination of color selection, painting, and filters.

I’m using this photo at the left to make my color swatches. Do a search on Google Images and you’ll find a hundred beautiful opal photos for source colors.

As you work through this tutorial, you’ll be working with these techniques and tools:

• Making and using a Swatch Collection
• Using the Brush tool
• Using Filters
• Using Layer Effects
• Modifying a Selection
• Using the Eraser

1. Make your Swatch collection.
   • Open your photo of the opal you’re trying to replicate.
   • Window > Swatches to open your Swatch palette. Click the New Folder icon and name your new folder.
   • With this folder clicked in your Swatches palette, type I to bring up your Eyedropper. Click your source photo to grab a color. Your foreground color will become that color.
   • Click the New Swatch icon at the bottom of your Swatches palette. And you’ve made a Swatch. Continue in this way until you have a good selection of the colors in your photo.

Now that you have a nice collection of colors let’s put them to work!

2. Throw some paint onto your canvas. Let your inner Jackson Pollock come through!

I used Kyle’s Spatter Brush Supreme Spatter and came up with this result. You’re not trying to make it look like anything but the colors at this point.

3. Apply some filters. At this point, you can get creative. I’ll tell you how I got my own result. Your mileage may vary, and that is good, because no two opals are identical!

• Here I used Filter > Pixellate > Crystallize with a size of 31. Duplicate this layer and then continue.

• Filter Blur > Gaussian Blur just to take off the raw edges.
• Duplicate this layer.

• Filter > Pixellate > Crystallize…37.
• Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur
• Filter > Pixellate > Crystallize…21
• Filter Gallery > Artistic > Rough Pastel.

• Rotate this layer 45 degrees.
• Put this layer into Multiply Blending Mode.
• Make a Merged Visibles Layer at this time.

TIP: To make a Merged Visibles Layer:
Hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift and type N and then E.

4. Type your text. Using a large blocky sort of font, type the text you want to be opal.

5. Get ready. Turn off visibility for all of the layers except your Merged Visibles Layer and your Type layer.

Drag the Type layer to just beneath the Merged Visibles layer.

6. Opalize the Text. Hold your cursor right between the opal layer and the Type layer in the Layers palette.

Hold the Alt key. When you see that little clipping icon as in my picture here, click!

You should see something on the order of my text here.

So the colors are pretty good, but the texture is wrong. I need it to have that sort of cabachon effect, like a shiny domed opal.

7. Apply some Layer Styles. These are the ones I used for my effect:

• Bevel & Emboss: Inner Bevel, Smooth, 63, 32, 4, Screen, Multiply.
• Stroke: 6, Outside, Normal, Color #867216.
• Inner Glow: Screen, 35, color #0ebef2, choke 56, size 76.
• Drop Shadow: 13, 10, 16.

Again, do this your own way. The numbers are just in case you want something approximately like this.

You can move the Opal surface independently of the letters, or even shrink or expand the opal surface with a transformation.

8. Add some Highlights. Look again at that opal photo at the beginning of this tutorial. We are missing that white highlight that tells us that this is a very high-domed cabachon shape.

In our lettering, of course, we don’t have that geometrically perfect shape of this gem. So we need to improvise to come up with highlights to make it look real.

Here I have used a small round brush to paint in highlights. Then I reduced the opacity of the highlight layer.

I’ll bet you can do better! Send me your Opal Text and I’ll post it here in my Student Gallery!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, and that you have learned some interesting techniques along the way!