Free Your Mind Tutorial

Here is a cool looking matrix-style effect that I stumbled upon a long time back. Here is what we will make in this tutorial…

1. This is going to be a long tutorial so make sure you have the time.. Start with a new document of any size you like. Make the background black.

2.An easy way to get the ASCII text is to type out the whole thing. Just kiddin!! Here is a short-cut method.. Find any large image file in your computer and open it with a text editing program. (Right click>Open With>Notepad).There you go.. Ready made ASCII text!!

3.The problem is that it is horizontal and not 3D.. We will come to that soon.
Copy a large part of the text to the clipboard.

4.In Photoshop, Select the Type Tool and create a textbox covering your whole document. Change the text-mode to Vertical (the button on the far left of the text tool bar). And choose Top-Align. Open the Character Palette. Select a suitable font. (I used Terminal) Change the textcolor to a light green. Font size 6px.

5.Paste the copied text into the textbox we just made. There you go, matrix style text ready!!. But it is still not 3D, and not glowing…

6.Set Vertical Scale to 70% to squish the letters together.Set the spacing to 10px. Then copy the layer twice. This is what you should have by now.

7.Change font size of first copy to 8px, spacing to 15px.

8.Change font size of second copy to 10px, spacing to 30px. By now you should have a complex, busy looking document which doesnt look very nice.. That is about to change. Some masking in in order!!

9.Select the first text layer, and click on the layer mask icon on the bottom of the layers palette. Set colors to White/Black (D). Do Filter>Render>Clouds. Go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast, and make contrast +100. Do Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur of about 20px. Now repeat for other 2 text layers. Should look like this:

10.Create a new layer set by clicking on the folder icon below the layers palette. Drag and Drop the three text layers into the folder. The layers palette should lok like this:

11.Looking good, but not complete yet. Lets give it some highlights.Select the layer set you have just created and click the mask button to add a layer mask. With the brush tool selected (6px, 100%hard), and foreground color set to Black, paint away some text-strips. Rub away more from the bottom than the top. If you make a mistake, just change over to white and brush over mistaken area to restore previous state.

12.Now for some glow!! Duplicate each text layer and right-click on new layer>Rasterize Type. Then right click on the layer mask thumbnail and select “Apply Layer Mask”. Repeat for other 2 copies. Merge the new copies and place them below the original text layers. Apply Gaussian Blur of about 1.5px. Click the layer mask button and Filter>Render>Clouds. Contrast 100.

Layer palette at this stage:

13.We are almost done… Create a new layer above the layer set. Take a hard 6px brush with white color and set layer mode to Overlay. Paint in the highlights. Basically you have to make the bottom part of most trails lighter green than the rest. Do Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur of 1.5px.

14.IF your color seems a bit off (mine didnt), just add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer, and play around with the settings to get what you like…

15.Throw in the text, and Voila!!

You know, it took me an hour to make the wallpaper (I didnt remember how to make it),then an hour to write this loooong tutorial… Comments will be highly appreciated.. Many people ask me how to comment…Look below this post. There is a “0 Comments” link. (It wont say 0 once there is a comment.. I am not teaching English, people!!). Click on the link, and leave a comment. A blogger account is not required.. I get discouraged if there are no comments after me spending so much time making tutorials…so PLEASE COMMENT…