Supernatural text effect in Photoshop

What You'll Be Creating

In this tutorial we'll be creating a smoky night effect on text to give it an eerie supernatural sort of feel. It's a good exercise in using the Wave distortion filter...

Using light and shadow text photoshop

In this tutorial we are going to take some very basic principles of light and shade to make a rather impressive-looking text effect.

Light Sources

So before we start the tutorial, here is a little diagram about how light might hit an object. Here we have a square object in the middle with light coming from the top left. You can see that where the light hits the object, a shadow is cast on the other side. Note that the shadow is not a Photoshop drop shadow, which makes the object look like it's hovering above the canvas. Here we want the object to look like it's a three dimensional thing stuck on the canvas, extruding if you like. Now tell me what other Photoshop tutorial site gives you diagrams? It's like being back in school!