Floating in the clouds

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to make your text float in a cloud but really you could do this with any object.

1. Start with a good photo of some clouds or download the source files at the end of this post to try it for yourself. Make sure there are areas of the clouds that are very white so you can get it to wrap around better. I played with the level in the photo to adjust for this slightly.
2. Make sure that your clouds are on the bottom layer in photoshop. This will work with CS4 as well at CS5. I am not sure about CS3.
3. Click the T tool and type something. This will make a new layer of type but you won’t see any clouds around it yet. 🙂
4. The next step is to couple click on the type layer to bring up the layer styles. Make sure the settings looks follows with slight adjustments on the slider for the effect.
   
5. The most important thing is the area I have circled above to blend the underlying layer if. You’ll need to split that white point slider by holding down the option key on a Mac or the Alt key on the PC and you can split the slider. Notice as you slide the lighter areas of the cloud will waft around the type.
6. Perhaps you like the effect but some portion is covered up more than you would like. Your not done then so you can do a little more adjusting by duplicating your type layer and making a mask of only what you want to show through.
7. After duplicating the layer and making sure it’s selected click the “layer mask” icon in the layers palette.
   
8. Fill the layer mask with black and then select a soft brush that has white as the foreground color and paint on the mask the parts of the type that you would like to reappear.
   Download the source file here. (3.4 mb)