Hollingsworth_Tips and Tricks

Ghostly Blur Text Effect

Start with your text typed in white in front of a solid black background.

In the Layers panel, the Type layer should be above the black Background layer:

Select the Type layer in the Layers panel, then go up to the Layer menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen, choose Rasterize, then choose Type:

"Rasterizing" type just means we're converting it from editable text into pixels, which we need to do before Photoshop will let us apply any filters to it. Nothing will look changed in the document window, but in the Layers panel you can see that the Type layer changed to a normal pixel-based layer:

Make three copies of the rasterized text by going up to the Layer menu, choose New, then choose Layer via Copy, or press Command+J to access the same command with the keyboard shortcut:

Place the layer above the original:

Do the same thing two more times and when you're done, you should have 4 text layers, plus the Background layer on the bottom:

Click on the original text layer in the Layers panel (the one directly above the Background layer):

Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, then choose Motion Blur:

Change the Angle of the blur to 90°, then begin dragging the Distance slider at the bottom of the dialog box towards the right to increase the amount of blurring. I set my Distance value to 150 pixels:

When you're done, click OK to close out of the dialog box. Your vertical motion blur effect should look similar to this:

Click on the layer above the original text layer in the Layers panel (the layer that says "copy" after its name):

Press Command+Option+F on your keyboard to access the last filter we used. This time, add a horizontal motion blur, so change the Angle to 0°:

Click OK to close out of the dialog box: