How To Create A Melting Effect In Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, you will how to create a great-looking, melting gold text effect in Photoshop. We will use a combination of layer blending techniques, as well as clipping masks and custom brushes to achieve this effect. Have a try!

This is an intermediate difficulty tutorial. You will need Photoshop CC or above to complete this tutorial.

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Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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OK Let's get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Gold Texture
Font
Liquid Brushes

Update November 2019

If you have any difficulty with applying gold texture onto the text, check out this video:

Step 1 – Background Preparation

Create a new document sized 1440px * 800px with black background. Load the Gold Texture into Photoshop, cover the entire image and paste it onto our canvas. Use a soft eraser to fade the edge of the texture as shown below:

Apply the following Levels adjustment to this gold texture:

And this is the effect so far:

Step 2 – Adding the Texts

Use the font we download, type some texts over our document:

Apply the following layer blending modes to this text layer:

Gradient Overlay

Drop Shadow

And this is the effect so far:

Step 3 – Applying Gold Texture

Go back to the gold texture layer, select the following portion with the rectangular marquee tool:

Cover the text with this texture:

Right-click on this new texture layer, and select "Create Clipping Mask":

Repeat the above process, add another smaller gold texture piece to cover the word "text", set it as clipping mask, and set the blend mode to "Vivid Light":

And this is the effect so far:

Step 4 – Making the Gold Text Melting!

Go to the gold texture and create a new, empty layer. Use the liquid brush we downloaded, paint the following pattern over the new layer:

Select this paint area, and go back to the background, copy this selection:

Paste the selection over to our document, re-size and fit our text as shown below:

Set the layer blend mode to "Color Dodge" for this gold texture layer – this will form a melting effect for our texture:

Repeat this process, add the melting effect to the left side texts:

Step 5 – Final Touch-ups

We will work on the final touch-ups for this melting gold text effect in this step. Again we can go to the gold texture, use a Lasso Tool (set its feather setting to 40px) to select the following area: