You know that textured, glittery gold lettering you’ve seen in quotes and other graphics? You can duplicate that technique in Photoshop to make your fonts and designs look amazing! Keep reading because I’m going to teach you how to create a gold foil effect in Photoshop.
1. Beginning with a blank white screen, choose two different colors for your foil from the color picker. One color will be for the foreground and the other color for the background. I’m selecting two different shades of yellow in varying intensities. See how the background color is darker than the foreground?
2. From the top menu, go to “Layer,” “New,” and “New Layer.”
3. Now go to “Filter,” “Render,” and “Clouds.”
4. Now you’ll see a cloudy, mottled gold color. This will serve as the base for your lettering:
5. Select “Filter,” “Noise,” and “Add Noise.”
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6. You’ll see this screen pop up. Check the box next to “Monochromatic,” and set the “Amount” to 7-8%. Press “OK.”
6. Go to “Filter,” and “Filter Gallery.”
Choose “Distort” and “Glass.” Play around with the “Distortion,” “Smoothness,” and “Scaling” sliders until you get your gold panel how you want it. Keep the “Texture” set to “Frosted.” These are my settings, but you can determine what you want yours to be. Here’s what my gold foil effect looks like at this point:
7. You will now add text to your foil.
Make a new layer.
Using a large font, select the “Text” icon in the toolbar, clicking on your foil.
Have fun choosing your font. I’m choosing “Matura MT Script Capital.”
Write some text, adjusting the size.
Drag and drop the gold layer on top of the text layer:
Go to “Layer,” create “Clipping Mask:”
You now have gold text with a foil effect. Here’s what the final text looks like. Pretty cool, right?
Watch the video tutorial below to see how the gold foil effect is achieved in real time:
Key Points
The foil effect in Photoshop is a great way to spice up your fonts, designs, and graphics. After you’ve done it a couple times, it will be super easy to complete the steps by memory. Have fun designing!
Have you used the foil effect before? Let me know in the comments:)
Hey Holly,
I’ve really enjoyed reading this article on “Creating A Gold Foil Effect In Photoshop” as it’s very helpful and informative. I’ve been trying to find out how to do this for some time.
I’ve just recently stepped into photography so I’m really interested in adding the gold foil effect to my images.
Its been very easy to follow the steps you’ve listed and I could finish all of them in 15 minutes.
Thank you taking your precious time in writing this blog post. Well Done Holly!
Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment. The gold foil effect is a fun technique and useful for many applications. You’ll soon memorize the steps and be able to create an effect in no time. Have fun creating!