Make a box office hit with movie poster type

Excerpted from “Photoshop CS Down & Dirty Tricks” by Scott Kelby.

Use the technique of grunging a photo in Adobe® Photoshop®. This is probably the most popular effect in Hollywood movie titles, and it’s used in a dozen other places as well. After you’ve created the effect, you’ll drop it into a movie poster layout.

1. Open a new document in RGB mode. Click on the Foreground Color Swatch and set your Foreground color to red. Press the letter “t” to get the Type tool and create your type (the type shown here is in Compacta Bold, from Bitstream, with the Horizontal Scaling set to 85% in the Character palette).

   

2. Open the photo that you’ll use to create your grunge. Photos with lots of vertical lines seem to work best; photos that have lots of rounded objects (like palm trees) don’t work nearly as well (I know from experience). I had to test the effect on about eight photos before I found this one.

   

3. Go under the Image menu, under Adjustments, and choose Threshold. Drag the slider nearly all the way to the left, to remove the color and detail, leaving just broken lines, spots, and smudges (as shown here). This is the step you’ll probably have to try on a number of photos until you find one that looks good. Click OK to apply Threshold.

   

4. Switch to the Magic Wand tool, then click directly inside one black area of your photo (it will probably only select a tiny section of your photo). Then go under the Select menu, and choose Similar to select all the similar black colored areas in your photo.

5. Get the Move tool and drag these selected black areas over into your red Type document as one unit. When it comes over, press Command-T (PC: Control-T) to bring up Free Transform. Hold the Shift key, grab a corner point, and drag inward to shrink the photo until it’s just slightly larger than your text. Then press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation.

   

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