how to make a photo look like it’s made of text in Photoshop

Colin Smith

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Making a Text Portrait in Photoshop Tutorial

This is a super fun effect. This will make your photo look like it’s entirely made out of text.

You will be using luminosity masks as well as layer masks and adjustment layers  to achieve this awesome effect. I have a primer on curves here that you may need to check out.

First of all there were dot matrix printers. People began organizing type in such as way as to create some of the first CG art. For the life of me, I have no idea how they had the patience. Then as graphics evolved, we wanted to make retro, lo fi style graphics. This tutorial shows you how to make a modern taje on the old text graphics. You can do this effecr in black and white and use a monotype to get a more retro feel if you want to. Even if you aren’t going for the same result as I have in this image, take a look at this tutorial because it will teach you a thing about masks and channels.  Here is a larger version of the final result.

Related Resources

Lorem ipsum Generator

Samuel Jackson Generator (Explicit language)

 

photo-to-text-result

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Don’t forget to subscribe to get a new tutorial each week as I release them.

Nice to see you here at the CAFE!

Colin


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6 comments

  1. Jennifer Moore

    There is some lovely fun of applying Samuel L Jackson text to photos of your in-laws. It’s a nice subtle way to share holiday frustration 🙂

  2. Charlotte Geier

    This looks like a fun trick and is enjoyable to watch. I can see there are possibilities to apply more than text. However, I cannot watch the tutorial and work in Photoshop trying to follow along. It is much better for me to have a tutorial I can print after watching the illustrations, so I have a handy referral tool to attempt the various steps.

  3. Novella Conti

    Really i’m very surprise to see your post about creating to make a photo look like it’s made of text in Photoshop . Keep continue sharing such post, Please .

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