Easily Make a Rough Text Effect with Brushes in Photoshop

Photoshop Text Effects

As you probably know, there are tons of different ways to make every kind of effect you can think of in Photoshop. Making a rough text effect is no exception. Today, I'm going to show you an alternative way to make a rough text effect using any kind of brush in Photoshop. This technique is super useful for making unique rough effects for overlaying on text (or any other graphic really) and you still will be able to edit the text after you applied the texture.

But before we begin, and if you want to follow this tutorial excatly as described, please download the following Watercolor Brushes pack for Photoshop right here at Medialoot: Download.

Step 1

Open Photoshop and make a new file at any size that you want. In this case, I will make mine at 1800 x 1200 px.

Step 2

Press "D" on your keyboard to reset the Foreground and Background colors.

Step 3

Select the Type Tool (T) and type your text using any font that you want. Here, I will simply write "ROUGH" using the Rift Soft Bold font at 600 pt.

Step 4

Press "Ctrl+J" on your keyboard to make a duplicate of the text layer.

Step 5

In the Layers Panel, set the Fill of the copied text layer to 0%.

Step 6

Go to Layer > Layer Styles > Stroke. Apply the following settings and click OK.

Step 7

Select the bottom text layer and go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All.

Step 8

Select the Brush Tool (B) and then click over the thumbnail of the layer mask to make it active.

Step 9

In the top toolbar, select any of the Medialoot Watercolor Brushes from the Brush Preset Picker. In this case, I will choose the "Medialoot - Watercolor 7".

Step 10

With the brush selected, paint over the layer mask of the bottom text layer by clicking only one time per stroke (do not click and drag as you normally do).

Step 11

With the layer mask thumbnail selected, go to Image > Adjustments > Levels.

Step 12

Apply the following settings, or adjust the Shadow, Midtone and Highlight sliders to your liking and click OK.

Conclusion

As you saw, making a rough text effect in Photoshop is very easy and there are many different ways to make it. By using this brush method, you can use almost any type of brush, adjust it to your liking and have an endless amount of textures to apply to your text like in the following examples.