How to Create Animated Text that Glitters and Sparkles

Want your text to truly shine? Here's how to create animated text that is literally glitters and sparkles.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Photoshop
• Adobe Image Ready

Create Your Text

1. 

   Open a new page and size it at 450 x 150pixels. Set a background color of your choice. Open a text box and select a font. Select a font color that contrasts with the background color. Now type in the text you want to work on.

2. Rasterize the text by right-clicking on it and clicking on Rasterize. With the magic wand, select the rasterized text. Feather the selection by 2 pixels.

3. Select the text once again, and contract it by 3 pixels: Modify >> Contract.

4. Delete the selected text area. Without canceling your selection, create a new layer and place it atop the rasterized text layer.

5. Feather your selection once again by 2 pixels. Now expand the selection by 2 pixels: modify >> expand. Use a light shade of the font color to fill the text.

Add a Glitter Effect and Sparkles to Your Text

1. 

   Open a new layer and place it atop the previous layer without canceling your selection.

2. Expand the selection by 3 pixels: modify >> expand. Fill this selection with an even lighter shade of the font color.

3. 

   Create three duplicate layers of this layer: layer > duplicate layer.
   Now add noise to each of the four layers: Filter>noise>add noise.
   Use the same noise level for all the layers.

4. 

   Add a sparkles to your text. Open a new page and size it at 500 x 500pixels. Set the background color to black. Add a new layer to page and then zoom in to 300 percent

5. Follow these steps to draw a sparkle:
   *Using the line tool, draw a 2 pixel line. Press Control+Enter to make a selection, and then fill it with white color. Without canceling your selection, use the erase tool at both ends of the line.
   *Use the transform tool: Control+T to rotate the image by 90 degrees.
   *Place the two lines atop each other to form a cross. Now merge both layers
   *Make a copy of the cross shape and use the transform tool to rotate it by 45 degrees to form an X.
   *Place the X symbol atop the cross to form a "star"and merge both layers.
   *Create a new layer. Place it behind the above layer.
   *Now draw a circle inside the star and feather it by 6 pixels. Fill it with white color.
   *Merge all the layers except the background. You will do this by selecting all the required layers and then pressing Control+E.
   The result is a complete sparkle.

6. 

   Copy the sparkle you just created and use the transform tool to create one small-size sparkle. Now, place sparkles at selected corners of your text. Arrange the sparkles in such a way that you will remember the order of the respective layers in the next step.

Animate Your Text

1. 

   Open your images in Adobe Image ready. Open the animation panel: Window >> Animation and create four frames.

2. 

   Set the time delay for 0.1 Sec.

3. Play the animation and watch your animated text glitter and sparkle.

Tips & Warnings

• To animate the Sparkles, on each frame randomly turn-off the visibility of the sparkle layers.

• To animate the glitter, turn off the visibility of the noise layers one after another in each frame. You will do this by turning off the first noised layer for first frame and turn it back on for second frame. The second noised layer should be turned off at the second frame and so on.