Giving Text a Motion Effect

Giving Text a Motion Effect

Solution

Create your text layer. Use an italic font to enhance the motion effect. Duplicate the

text layer using Ctrl-J (Command-J on a Mac). Right-click (hold Ctrl and click on a Mac)

on the original layer, and select Rasterize from the menu that appears.

Now we’re going to apply a filter to make the text look like it’s moving. Filters can

only be applied to raster layers, which is why we’ve rasterized our original layer.

Select Filter > Blur > Motion Blur to bring up the Motion Blur dialog. To make your text

look like it’s moving horizontally, set the Angle to 0°. Adjust the Distance to a value

that works with your text.

The Basics 1

In the finished example below, I’ve adjusted the

Opacity of the motion layer in the Layers palette to fade

it out slightly, and used a layer mask to hide the righthand

side of the blur effect so that the text looks like

it’s moving towards the right. (If you need a refresher

on creating layer masks, see the solutions for “Fading

an Image into the Background” in Chapter 2.)

WARNING Raster Right!

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