How to make scratchy text in Photoshop and call it distressed or weathered to sound cool

By Jim on October 6th, 2008 | Posted in Photoshop Tutorials | 5 Comments
Tags: distressed text effect, Scratchy Photoshop Text, weathered text effect

Most Photoshop know-it-alls like to call scratchy text ‘distressed’ or ‘weathered’ or some other corny ass sounding effect. I make it a point to never call it distressed or weathered text because it just sounds like some fruitcake Photoshop asshole trying to sound cool. And as we all know, I’m already so far beyond cool that any more coolness would probably make me a real chode waxing dongmaster.

So, today I’m gonna show you how to make GOOD OL’ SCRATCHY text in Photoshop. It’s easier than taking a piss in the woods. If you’re a chick and have to squat to pee, this may seem outrageously difficult. Well, not really. Enough with the bullshit and lets make our text.

Start with a new document. Mine is 800×500 at 72dpi, filled black.

New file 800x500 @72dpi, filled black.

Now it happens to be that fatter fonts work better than thin fonts for adding scratchiness. I’ll illustrate using both, but my advice would be to stick with the bigger fatter fonts like Impact, Futura Extra Bold, etc.

Lets choose some really valid text to get started with. I’m choosing Futura Extra Bold on top, and Trebuchet MS on the bottom since these are quite common fonts and you’ve probably already got them. I also setup a guide at 400px, which gives us a good reference for the center of our document. I can then choose my move tool by pressing V, and check the ‘Show Transform Controls’ up top. This will give us a bounding box around our text, and let us line it up dead center.

Add your text, and use a guide setup at 400px to perfectly center the text. Be sure that bounding box is showing.

Because this is easy as shit to do, we can jump right into it. We’re going to create a layer mask and use the brush tool to ‘paint in’ our scratchiness on the mask layer. Now you could add a layer mask directly to the text layer, but personally I prefer to create a new layer group that contains the text layer, and apply the scratchy effect layer mask to the layer group. This allows me to scale or change my text independent of the scratchy shit. Plus it just seems easier to reuse at a later time, if I need to duplicate the effect.

Here we setup our layer group and added a mask to the group layer. Text layer goes inside here.

The easiest way to create scratchiness is using the brush tool, and choosing the ‘Spatter 59 pixels’ brush. There are several different stock sizes that Photoshop provides us, any of them will work, but I’ve found the 59px to give the broadest, most consistent results. Here’s a quick comparison on the differences of these brushes:

Here's a quick comparison at the different default spatter brushes Photoshop gives us. For our scratchy text, we're choosing 59px.

Use the Spatter 59 pixels brush to get our scratchy effect.

Double check that your layer mask is selected, you have black for your color, and start adding some scratchy brush strokes to the outsides of your text. There’s no exact science to it here, we’re just going for somewhat uniform coverage. Now that might seem a bit redundant, but it’s what we want.

Generally at first, I ‘paint’ with my brush by simply clicking the mouse where I want the effect to appear. Basically it just takes a ton of single one-click brush strokes, if that makes sense. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s OK to be liberal here. You want to include the insides of some characters, not just the outside. Here’s what I ended up with on my first go:

Use 'clicks' instead of 'strokes' when brushing the spatter brush on and around your text.

Now that we have a foundation of scratchiness applied, we can unmask off some areas using our paintbrush again, only this time choosing white. Remember, masks work with black and white. A fully white mask shows everything beneath it, where as a fully black mask won’t show shit. What we’re going for now is to tone the effect down some, but still leave spots ‘inside’ of the characters, not just on the edges. I like to bump my opacity down when painting white, because it gives you a bit of play. Here’s what I ended up with after a little painting back white:

Use white and black to add and subtract to your preferred scratchiness levels.

You can probably tell by now how much crappier the Trebuchet font looks compared to the fatness of the Futura font. But even looking at the fat font at top, it still just doesn’t look convincing enough. This is an effect that tends to do much better when its used with some form of background that warrants the scratch text. So in order to make it look really realistic, lets get some background something in there. A quick look through my photos yeilded this one, which has a nice texture to work with:

This roughed-up wood picture will work well for our background.

Place this image right above our background layer and beneath our text layer group. Set the blending mode on your text layer to overlay. I blew away the lower text, and tilted it clockwise just a hair to equal the same angle that our shoddy piece of wood is at. I also filled my text color to black. As we can see, our text is looking a little better.

Scratchiness looks good with a scratchy, shitty background.

With our text looking nicer, we can play around with the color temperature a bit. Because I think negatively of Elizabeth Dole, I’m going with a cool blue effect. Add a hue/saturation layer above all the other layers, check the Colorize box, and set your settings where they look good. I’m using the following for mine:

Here's what I used for my Hue/Saturation layer.

After adjusting the opacity of the hue/saturation adjustment layer down to around 60%, we have a very cold, heartless piece of wood stamped with an appropriate name and phrase.

Here we have our distressed weathered worn ass out scratchy text. Elizabeth Dole Sucks.

And there you have it. Scratchy, shitty looking text in just a few steps using the brush tool and a layer mask. If you need, you can download my original Photoshop file as a reference.