This Adobe Photoshop tutorial takes the simple “create metal text effect in Photoshop” that thousands of people teach all over the web and turns it on it’s head! Adding polishes, shines, motion blurs, and oh yes… NINJA STARS. It’s a must read.

Now open the ninja star image we downloaded at the beginning of the tutorial and cut it out using the same method as with the ninja.  Then, drag it into our composition.

Now select Command + M to bring up the curves window and draw the following curve:

With the ninja star layer still selected, push Shift + Command +  U to desaturate it.

Now we’re going to skew the star to make it look like it’s coming at the viewer.  To do this, we’re going to select edit > transform > perspective

Resize the ninja star until you get an effect like this:

Now, we’re going to add the following settings to the ninja star to make it a little more realistic:

It should now look something like this:

Now, we’re going to Duplicate this layer by selecting it and pushing Command + J.  Select the duplicated layer and go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and enter the following settings:

Now, make sure the blurred layer we just created is under the original ninja star layer.  Position the blurred layer to make it look like it is streaking off of the original ninja star layer as shown below:

Do this with about 3 different ninja stars like we have here:

The last step is to add some shines on the metal text and ninja stars.  To do this select the Polygon Tool (U) and in the settings bar, select 5 sides and “star” and 99% as shown below:

Now create a new layer and draw some white highlights over bright points in the design and set the layer blending mode to Overlay.  Now you’re done!

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