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Home / Photography Tips / How to Create a Neat Text Effect in Photoshop

Photoshop text effects featured

How to Create a Neat Text Effect in Photoshop

March 30, 2016 by Darlene Hildebrandt

Updated: March 30, 2016

The text tool in Photoshop is what you use to add words over your images. But did you know you can do some pretty neat effects with it, including putting your image inside the letters?

In this video tutorial I will walk you through first the basics of using the Text Tool in Photoshop and then how to do stuff like this in less than two minutes!

Text-tricks-1

Text-tricks-4

Text-tricks-5

Would you believe it if I tell you that you can do all that without having to do any manual selections or tedious masking? Well it’s true. It’s really not hard – just watch and follow along with the video. If my non-photographer husband can do it, you can too!

Some key points to remember from this lesson are:

  • Make sure you add the clipping mask so the image applies to the text layer only.
  • Make sure that you put any adjustment layers (with effects you want to apply to the background), below your text layer.
  • To make your image easily changeable make sure you add your image as a Smart Object and use a unique file name for it (so you don’t accidentally save over your original image files). To do that you can just open an image and save it as a new name like: Image-for-Words.jpg.
  • When you copy the image layer to make a faded background, if it stays as a Smart Object too it will also automatically update when you change the image above.

There’s so much more you can do with text but this should give you some fun things to try out and play with. Pick a few images and make a poster. Please share what you make in the comments below – I’d love to see what you come up with.

Cheers,

Darlene-1-250x130.png

About Darlene Hildebrandt

Darlene Hildebrandt, Master of Photographic Arts (MPA), is a Canadian photography educator and the founder of Digital Photo Mentor. She holds Canada's highest professional photography designation from Professional Photographers of Canada, served as Managing Editor of Digital Photography School, and represented Canada on Team Canada at the 2025 World Photographic Cup. With over 35 years of experience, from darkroom film retouching to modern digital editing, more than 17,000 students have learned to edit with confidence through her structured online courses in Luminar Neo and Lightroom Classic and the Digital Photo Mentor Community.

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