12 Glitter Effect Photoshop Tools to Glitz up Your Life

Glam up the glum!

If you've ever wanted to be more fancy, here's your chance. We've compiled a curated list of resources and tutorials to help you make that glorious, sparkly glitter look that's so in right now.

These gorgeous glitter effect tools and processes for Photoshop will make sure you create the most glamorous style in every design. Plus glitter is super on trend. So whether you want a realistic, grainy looking glitter, or a smoother, more seamless backdrop, here are 12 of the internet's best ways to get your designs to glow. 

We start out first with 6 top-notch resources, many with a free option as well as a premium version. Then we move on to 6 fab tutorials that will be sure to teach you everything you ever wanted to know, but didn't want to get glitter glued to your hands for. 

6 Resources and Pre-Made Glitter Textures

Here are the best already-built and easily-repurposed glitter textures, brushes, vectors, and styles that the internet has to offer. 

Real Glitter textures

Ten lovely high resolution textures. These are made from images of real glitter, so they are large-grain, real-looking textures. Details stand out just enough to make the textures look tactile enough to touch, since they're created from hi-res photographs. Multiple colors included! Some but not all: gold & rose gold, red, silver, green, blue, and teal.

Glitter Text Effect for Photoshop

A pack bursting at the seams with sparkles. This super-useful set comes with glitter patterns, brushes, and actions to create a fab sparkly glitter text effect in Photoshop with pretty much no effort. Use the brush on either vector shape layers or text layers. Bonus, a sample .psd file is included as a tutorial to help you get started using the effect. (Basically to get started, you just need to install the Brushes, Pattern Preset and Actions, then open "Glitter Text Effect.psd" in Photoshop. Make the text into whatever you want, and then run the "Glitter Effect for Text" action.) Paint that glitter on generously with the brush, and bam! Glam.

Glitter Seamless Textures

Glorious, glittery, gold. These seamless metallic glitter textures come in gold, rose gold, and silver, to glitz up anything and everything. They're great for backgrounds or shapes for a handcrafted, artistic feel, but you can also use them to overlay on text if you don't want to get a brush (the resource just above is great for that). 8 different glitter textures come in the pack, with 3 color variations each. Bonus, you don't need no color variations! Just adjust your Hue/Saturation and voila, any color glitter you like!

Free Realistic Glitter Effect 

Designer Graphic Spirit brings us this lovely pattern texture. The link above is to the freebie, truncated version, but you can find the full, lovely set for $15 here. Use this blingy style for wedding themes, glam greeting cards, promotional leaflets with flair, etc. The Photoshop package comes available in ASL format — quite quick and easy to use. The file itself for the freebie version is small.

Glitter Patterns and Styles

This free pack comes with 8 set of patterns to make everything you design a little more glam. The textures are fairly realistic, and come in different colors for you to choose from. Each of the patterns come as repeating JPEG  .PAT and .ASL formats, a set of Photoshop Patterns and Photoshop Styles, that can be applied directly to your design elements to lend glitzy appearance. You can apply the Photoshop Patterns or Styles directly. To use the .PAT file, use Load Patterns option of the Patterns menu, then apply the glitter effects using the Pattern Overlay option of the Layer Styles window, or the Fill Tool. 

Glitter Vector Brushes

Every brush in this comprehensive vector pack comes from REAL glitter. The artist took a photo, cleaned up the shot, and converted the image to a vector (of course adjusting the results to get that perfect level of sparkle). The result? A truly-authentic glitter look that can make your designs twinkle and shine — without the glitter gun or mess!

6 Tutorials and How-Tos to Make Your Own Glitter

Making your own glitter can be super easy, too, if you don't want to buy a realistic looking pack. All you need is Photoshop!

A Simple How-To for Basic Glitter Texture

Here's a drop-dead simple way to create a varying texture glitter look that you can apply anywhere. This is a nice from-scratch method that makes building a blank document into a sparkle palace possible (and fun!). Only a few easy steps required. 

An Even Easier Glitter Tutorial 

Here's another simple method to make your own glitter (in case you didn't like the last one). This version is a little simpler and relies on a built-in texture that ships with photoshop, so the result is a bit more repetitive, and not quite as varied as you'll get from a real photo of glitter.

Simple Video Tutorial for Glitter Text

Here's a quick and dirty, 2 minute video on how to get that glitter look right away. It's probably the quickest video tutorial on creating glittery, shimmery text on Photoshop. Requires Photoshop CS5 and up. 

In Depth Video Tutorial for Making Glitter Textures

This video is a deep dive into making glitter backgrounds, patterns and text effects for Photoshop. The author uses pattern fills (these ship with Photoshop) in order to make custom glitter styles and designs. After watching this, you'll know how to create the pattern, color the glitter and use it to fill any shape or size object. And at the end, learn to make that stuff twinkle!

How to Create an Easy Gold Glitter Text Effect in Adobe Photoshop

Once you've got the texture creation down, this tutorial will show you how to make a glittering text with glossy overlay effect using a ton of layer styles. There are 5 main steps, each one with multiple interior steps. The result (above) is a bubbly, glittery look you can make yourself. Props to the props: the text is RockoUltraFLF font and the background texture is Unrestricted grey soft grunge by DivsM-stock.

Glittering Diamond Effect Tutorial

This is a more in-depth tutorial, but sometimes you have to spend the extra to get the goods. In this case, sparkling, diamond-y goods. This is the next step up from glitter, so the perfect place to end our round up of all things sparkly. Happy glittering!