Photoshop Working With Displacement Maps In Photoshop Tutorial

This tutorial photoshop text will explain how to use the displace filter in Photoshop. The purpose of this tutorial is to give you a simple example to help you better understand what exactly this filter does. With some practice and experimenting, you can achieve very impressive and often realistic effects with this filter.

1. Preparing the document
I’ve started by creating a new file with the following settings;


Essentially what we are trying to do is create the illusion that whatever we create is part of the original image or texture. The image that you choose to use is completely up to you, and will certainly vary on what it is your trying to accomplish. For this tutorial, I have chosen a wood texture to create the effect of the text being painted on, and aged with the wood.
Essentially what the displace filter will do is use a gray scale version of our texture to displace the text based on the light and dark areas of the texture.

Next I’m going to place the image I want to use in to the document,

file > Place

After the image is properly laid out on the canvas, I select the image layer, right click > rasterize.
With the texture layer selected;

image > adjustment > desaturate

Next I typed out the text I want to use;





2. Create the displacement map
I created a duplicate of the texture layer and turned off visibility of all the other layers.
With the new texture layer selected;

image > adjustment > threshold

Find a balance that still leaves a fair amount of detail. Think in terms of depth. The white areas will be raised while the black areas will be depressed;



Once I am happy with the result of the threshold settings, I will save the document with a name different then my project folder. I used something original and named it displacement


After this is completed I turn off the threshold layer and turn back on my other layers.


3. Applying the displace filter
With text layer selected;

filter > distort > displace

When the dialog box opens, you will be ask to locate a file. This is where I want to use that file I saved named ” displacement”.
I used the following settings for the displacement;




4. Adding detail
Next I added a color overlay effect to the text layer.



To give the text a more aged and rustic look, I turned back on my threshold layer and made a selection of the layer.
With the selection still active, I then turned off the visibility of the texture layer, selected the text layer and pressed delete, or backspace. This will result in the selection that I made of the wood detail from the threshold layer being deleted from the text layer.


Next I created a layer mask on the texture layer and masked the top and bottom of the image;





After that, I created a very light gaussian blur to the text.
With the text layer selected;

filter > blur > gaussian blur

I used the following settings;



And this is the result;


Thanks for checking out this tutorial. I hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions please free to post them in the comments.

Thanks,
-Craig