[English Tut] Design an interesting Cloud Text Effect in Photoshop

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:
Lucida-handwriting Italic Font
Cloud Brush
Smoke Brush
Hot Air Balloon
Step 1
Create a new document sized 1400px * 700px, grab the Gradient Tool and fill the background layer with a light blue gradient:

Click to enlarge the following screenshot to reveal the colour code:

Use the cloud brush set you downloaded, paint some white cloud on a new layer and we will use this as our background:

Step 2
We will type some texts onto our canvas, I used the “Lucida Handwriting” font that comes with Photoshop:

Load the smoke brush into Photoshop and use the following set:

Press “F5″ to bring up the brush options window, apply the following setting:
Shape Dynamics

Make sure you tick the “Smoothing” and “Protect Texture” option.
Use the brush, gently paint over the text as shown below, adjust the brush size accordingly:


Turn off the original text layer, and you will have the following effect:

Then on this newly painted cloud layer, apply the following “Bevel and Emboss” layer blending effect:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3
We will add some retouches to this effect. To make text slightly sharpen, we flatten the image and apply the following “Unsharpen Mask” filter (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharpen Mask):

We can paint some cloud under the text, just to make the text look like floating above the cloud:


Load the hot air balloon PSD File into Photoshop and add some hot air balloons into the image:

Finally we can use the same brush in step 2 to add some extra cloud texture around the text:

and here is my final effect: (click to enlarge)

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