Adding a Glow to Your Text

With the popularity of the television show X-Files , people have been asking how to create the glowing text effect seen in the opening credits.

The following exercise shows you how to create the glow. Follow these steps:

1. Open a new 500x200pixel image with the resolution set to 72 pixels per inch. Set the background color to black and the image type to 16.7 million colors.

2. Set the background color to a bright green (I used R:30, G:255, and B:45) and set the Foreground Style to none. Select the Text tool and click in the image to bring up the Text Entry dialog box.

3. Use the settings from the previous exercise and choose a font that resembles a typewriter font. I chose Times New Roman (see Figure 39.15).

   Figure 39.15. Bright green text on black.

   

4. Choose Selections, Select None to deselect the text (or you can right-click the image when the Selection tool is selected).

5. Choose Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and then set Radius to 5.00. Click OK.

6. Apply the Gaussian Blur one more time with the same settings. The text should now have very soft edges and be blurry (see Figure 39.16).

   Figure 39.16. Bright green text on black applications of the Gaussian Blur filter.

   

7. Change the background color to black and click in the image again to open the Text Entry dialog box. Click OK to add the same text to the image.

8. The text comes into the image in black this time. All that you need to do is position it over the blurry green text from the preceding steps.

   Move the mouse pointer over the text until the four-headed cursor appears and click and drag the black text into place over the green text.

9. Choose Selections, Select None to remove the marquee, and you should end up with text that resembles Figure 39.17.

   Figure 39.17. Final glowing, X-Filestype text.