Creating Glowing Type

This tutorial was originally written for PaintShop Pro 5.0 but I have updated it for the latest version. The final result is text that has a glowing halo, nimbus, aura, pick your own adjective, around it. The technique works best with a black or dark-colored background. Here goes.

Open a new graphic with a black or dark-colored background. Select the type tool and add your text. The font doesn't really matter but the size should be fairly large. Make sure that you are creating the text as a vector. Create a selection from the new text by clicking Selections, From Vector Object and save the selection to the Alpha Channel (Selections, Load/Save Selection, Save Selection to Alpha Channel...) because that way you can get it back easily if you accidentally do something to de-select it.

Make the text layer invisible for now. It will make it easier for you to see what you are doing while you are working on the glow part of the graphic.

Add two new layers below the text layer. (Hint: You can add a layer quickly by holding down the shift key when you click on the new layer button on the Layers palette.) Make the middle layer active by clicking on it. Now expand your selection by from one to three pixels depending on the thickness of your font. Thicker fonts can be expanded more. (Selections, Modify, Expand) Fill the selection with the color you want for your glow and then clear the selection. (Selections, Select None) For the sample, I expanded the selection by three. Your graphic should look something like this:

Figure 1

Now we're going to blur the text. Select Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur and enter a radius of 4. This is the result:

Figure 2

Now you can make your text layer visible again. The final results look like this:

Figure 3

That's it. If you are using a thick font, there are several variations you can create. For example:

Figure 4

First I added another layer on top of the text layer. Then I applied the cutout effect (Effects, 3D Effects, Cutout) twice. In both cases the Fill Interior with Color checkbox was NOT checked. First I used the foreground color for the shadow color with a opacity set to 75%, a blur of 15, and x and y offsets of -2. Then I used white for the shadow color, opacity still at 75% and blur set to 15. This time the offsets were 2 and 2. It's really quite a subtle difference from the simpler version, but the text seems to have more definition.

Figure 5

The final example used the same basic image as the last one. This time, however, when I created the pink layer, I expanded the selection 5 pixels and then I added an extra layer between the bright pink and the black fill. I loaded the selection on the intermediate layer and expanded it by a single pixel. For the fill I selected a bright sky blue and then blurred the image by two pixels. Finally I made the text visible, added another layer on top of the text layer and did the cutouts as before.

Experiment with the technique and see what you can come up with. If you use images you created using this technique on your web site, let me know. I'd love to see what you've done!