A while back I made an advertisement for our quarterly retiring sale. It featured my dad, on his post-retirement vacation, walking a sandy beach. I used a text style that mimicked writing on the sand. I had a couple of people email in asking me how I did that.

Now that we are smack-dab in the middle of our LAD: Beachcomber, I think now is the perfect time to talk about fake writing in the sand with Photoshop. Those of you playing along already know what the prompt-of-the-day will be today ?

I’m using the same style I used then (scroll on down to grab this free Photoshop ASL style), with a little extra tweak to make it look even better. I grabbed Thaliris Designs gorgeous paper from our July 13 prize: PROMPT 04: Beachcomber July 13, 2019; my Beach Writing style (free below); and one of my favorite free fonts: Dolato de Stato from dafont.com.

Even without the Beach Writing style it looks pretty good!

But I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I apply my Beach Writing Style:

It’s a little dark. I’m not thrilled. Not unhappy, just not thrilled. It turns out just reducing the Fill in my Layers Palette from 100% to 54% does the trick. It looks much more natural now:

And then I looked at it too long. It’s still not perfect. It’s not quite laying on the sand naturally. But. I have a solution. The first step is to Rasterize Type. We need to do this in order to Transform the text to look more natural.

Now that our text has been Rasterized we can Transform the pixels to look more natural in our image. Here’s how:

  • With your Rasterized Text layer selected
  • Click Edit –> Transform
  • Then Click on Perspective

A selectable box appears around your rasterized text layer. Simply click + drag a corner until the perspective on your text looks more natural, then click the check box in the top menu.

And that is how you fake writing on the sand!

You can download my free Beach Writing Style here:

click to DOWNLOAD

Karen, SnickerdoodleDesigns, has a helpful post on How to Load Layer Styles in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements