Jelly « Effect « Photoshop Tutorials

This Photoshop tutorial will teach you how to create a jelly text effect.

The first thing I did was to correct the composition. First, I cropped off much of the empty blue space at the bottom of the image. Then, I used Edit>Transform>Skew to stretch the top of the image, pulling some of it out of the frame. This gets rid of some of the annoying detail in the upper right part of the original image, and also lets the glowing center of the jellyfish fill up more of the frame. Next, I used the Image>Adjust>Channel Mixer to alter the colors. The Channel Mixer is a powerful tool that requires a lot of experimentation in order to achieve the results you want. Here, I used it to reduce the amount of blue in the image and to increase the amount of red in the image. I was also able to increase the overall brightness of the image by having some of the channel mixes add up to more than 100%. Each image requires its own treatment. You can get an idea of how you might want to mix the channels if you first go to the Channels palette and look and the Red, Green, and Blue channels separately. After some trial and error, I produced the result you can see in Figure 2.

The final result is an image of a milky white jelly with the feeling of a glowing life force in its globe, that seems almost lit from within. The jelly retains the delicate feel of the lacy fringe, whose delicacy is further emphasized by the highlights we added. Just the right amount of pink edging adds some color interest to the image, while the blue shadows lend it mystery. While the image still has a photographic feel, the viewer also senses the slow, lazy drifting through a dense black outer space.

Merge all the text layers. Double click the layer to open layer style window. Apply layer style with the settings shown.