Learnings: Text Portraiture

You may not mask the text outside of the pic. by Jerm Narvaez

The art of text portraiture is easily to be mistaken as a bunch of work when in fact it is a click-this-click-that-and-you're-done kind of job. Just get your desired picture, make sure to replace the background with white (if it's not already white). Now desaturate it and save it as a .psd file - this is essential for the displacing you're going to do later. Now create a new layer that is filled with black. Then start carefully and randomly placing the text, you can use a single line or quote, name, whatever your heart desires, or a variety of them. You can just duplicate these text by holding alt (which will transform your cursor into a double cursor) and clicking on the text and dragging the text. Make sure to use a varitey of sizes. AND MAKE SURE THE TEXT IS WHITE. Now once you feel you've covered your subject, merge all your text with the black layer , go to Filter>Distort>Displace, put in the value 15 on both horizontal and vertical displacement. Select the black and white .psd file you created. Now change the blending mode of the merged text to light burn. Mask the text outside of your subject and you're done.

This was what I was working with. The finished file aswell as the .psd raw file got lost while I was transferring files from my flash drive to my laptop =( This screenshot was the only thing left of its whole text portrait glory.

Wait, that IS a lot of work.

refer to this tutorial.