We’ve all seen the tutorials all over the place on how to blend text into the grunge or 3d render background of sigs in Photoshop. This style is extremely popular these days and looks great for pretty much any kind of background. In fact, to emphasize this point, I’ve randomly selected a background from one of the tutorials in the P2L index to show you how this can be done with any image in Corel photopaint!

For this tutorial, I’m going to use the background effect in this Photoshop signature tutorial titled Star Explosion - Create this interesting Exploding Star / Nebula effect. Here’s what it looks like with our blended text added:

As you can see, we simply used a text overlay with a specific set of applied filters to make the text stand out, yet still match the background. You can control just how blended the text is by playing with the filter settings, so I went for a medium blend strength in this tutorial. Shall we being?

First, let’s grab the original image we’ll use to start:

Step 1: With your image open in PhotoPaint, select the Text tool (Type ‘T’) and add some text with decent width and size. Don’t make your text too tacky by going HUGE, but keep it a good size so the effect comes out properly. If your text is too thin, the effect is lost somewhat.

Step 2: Once you’ve completed your text, create a mask from the text (Mask from Object) by hitting ‘Ctrl-M’ and this will form a mask around your text.

Step 3: In your object docker, select the background by clicking on it once or simply click on the background itself with the Object pick Tool (hit ‘O’). This will ensure that the next steps will apply to the background rather than the text object.

Step 4: Select the Rectangle Mask Tool by hitting ‘R’ - this will then tell PhotoPaint that any further steps will be applied to whatever is within the mask on the current object rather than the entire object currently selected, which is the background at the moment.

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