Embroidered Text in Photoshop

Friday, 05. 2. 2008  –  Category: Tutorials

A friend of mine was working on some logos for a little league team and asked me for a way to make text look as if it had been embroidered onto a uniform.

After a fair amount of experimentation, it turns out it’s not that hard to do — but it does take a little tweaking. The final results are surprisingly versatile.

In this tutorial, we’re going to make the this header for a fictitious sewing blog:

GET THE FILES

To follow along, you’re going to need this brush and this layer style. (Right click and choose “Save Link As…”/”Save Target As…” to download.) You can also grab them both together as a 4kb zip file here.

START SEWING

1. Create a new file, 900×500. Fill the background with black.

2. Add the text (T) you want to make look embroidered. Use a really thin font for this — the stitch effect traces the outsides of the letters, and if you use something too bold you’re only going to get embroidered outlines. I’m working with Nobel Light. Make sure there’s enough space between your letters to avoid overlapping piles of thread.

3. Click the text warp button on the Options bar.

Choose “Arc” from the drop-down menu and set the Bend slider to about 19.

(You can skip this and the following step if you just want straight letters.)

4. Hit Ctrl+T, rotate the text a bit and hit enter.

5. With the type layer selected, choose Layer > Type > Create Work Path.

You have now created a path based on the outlines of the text.

6. Select the brush tool and load the brush file you downloaded. Change the size to 8pt or so. Make sure your foreground color is the same as your text color.

7. Create a new layer. (Shift+Ctrl+N)

8. Choose the pen tool (P), then right-click on the image and choose “Stroke Path…”.

Make sure “Brush” is selected and the “Simulate Pressure” box is checked.

Click OK. Yay, fuzzy text!

9. Load the layer style you downloaded, and apply it to the stroke layer (not the type layer).

Select the text layer underneath and make the font color a little lighter.

And there you have it. Shiny embroidered text:

10. Find a home for your fine sewing work, like this blog template:

Keep in mind that the brush preset also works as, well, a brush, and you can also use it to draw embroidered-looking things on its own — for instance, the RSS feed icon in the example. Just be sure to drop the layer style on top for shine.

Happy stitching!

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15 Responses to “Embroidered Text in Photoshop”

  1. Tami Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 4:04 am

    I can’t seem to download the brush or layer style. You have the most realistic embroidery look on the web! Can you please email the brush/layer style?
    Thanks

  2. Victoria Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

    Thanks! Try right-clicking and choosing “save link as…” — they should work just fine. Clicking on them in some browsers just gives you the files as scrambled text.

  3. Glynn Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    Is it possible to create an animated’Embroidered Text’ using font type Edwardian Script ITC? How hard would that be to do?

  4. Victoria Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 6:14 pm

    Hm. Are you talking about animating in Photoshop or After Effects? I can think of a couple possibilities for each…

  5. Derek Says:
    March 24th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

    Nice tutorial. I modified your technique a bit and came up with even better results that you might enjoy trying out. Adjust the Angle Jitter to Direction, then when stroke the path, make sure your foreground color is set to a darker tone of your final color. (Almost black) Stroke the path twice with that color, then once more with your final lighter tone. Apply the layer style to your embroidery layer and text layer, and voila. You end up with a lot more shadow and a bit of a Anisotropic highlight that runs the center of the text.

  6. Vesa Loikas Says:
    May 12th, 2009 at 7:24 am

    KIITOS (Thank You) for a great tutorial. I got wonderful results!

  7. Victoria Says:
    August 21st, 2009 at 7:00 pm

    Thanks! I’d love to see anything you created. :-)

  8. Jonni™ Says:
    November 17th, 2009 at 12:24 am

    best embroidery effect tutorial i’ve found so far – good work – unfortunately it didn’t work out for the object I was trying to simulate.

    for those having problems downoading the brush and style on a mac using safari, pres down the alt/opt key on your keyboard and hold while clicking the link and you should get a good download.

  9. Darius Says:
    January 22nd, 2010 at 11:22 pm

    Hello Victoria, thank you for this great tutorial, but I was wondering if you knew how I could edit your brush so that I could make a version for filling in large areas of graphics. I have been asked to mockup some embroidered effects on some graphic patches. So I would need to be able to fill very large shapes to make them look embroidered or filled with thread. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Darius.

  10. Victoria Says:
    January 22nd, 2010 at 11:53 pm

    Hmmm.. that’s a good question! Large embroidered areas are usually made out of stripes of smaller stitches, so you could actually try running the effect on a bunch of vector lines, then masking that to fit the area (and maybe using the effect on the outside edges as well?

    You could also try using the effect on the edges, then filling the middle with a texture taken from a photo of embroidery (something like the shield areas on this?) and matching the color.

    It’s also possible to use the brush as a paintbrush and vary the size as you go — if you have a graphics tablet, setting the scale to be based on pen pressure will allow you to draw stitches of varying length.

    Hope some of that is helpful!

  11. Darius Says:
    January 23rd, 2010 at 12:05 am

    I guess I am looking for the same effect, but as a fill not a stroke if that is possible…

  12. Dhruvin Says:
    January 31st, 2010 at 1:45 am

    Hey I cannot download the files either. When I download them I get 1 kb files. I don’t think this is the real files because usually brushes are 7mbs and I can’t open it with Photoshop. I downloaded via save target as.. and clicked on it. Can you please send it to my email? Thank you and Great Tutorial

  13. Victoria Says:
    February 1st, 2010 at 4:02 pm

    Dhruvin, they’re each 4kb files — the usual much larger files you’re talking about contain sets of multiple brushes, often with complex shapes. This is just one fairly basic brush and a single layer style. I’ve added a link to grab both as a zip file, however — let me know if that works. :-)

  14. Dhruvin Says:
    February 2nd, 2010 at 5:08 am

    I got the files and they work just fine. Thank you, but when I try to create embroidered text I can not get it to be fuzzy. I followed all your steps perfectly except I used red instead of pink and used another font instead of Nobel Light because I don’t have it.

  15. Victoria Says:
    February 2nd, 2010 at 4:16 pm

    The brush and style should work fine with other fonts, as long as they’re a thin weight.

    Can you post a sample of what your work looks like? I can be more helpful if I can see what you’re getting, but here are some possible fixes:

    If it’s the shape of the brushstroke that seems wrong, and it just isn’t “fuzzy” looking:
    - Make sure you’re not actually hiding a selection that’s cropping off the edges of the stroke. (I keep doing that by accident myself!)
    - Try increasing the scatter slider in the brush settings if the stitches are too close together, or playing with the brush size if you’re using bigger or smaller type.
    - If the font is too thick, you can select its outlines, then contract the selection a few pixels. You can also experiment with stroking single paths you draw yourself.

    If the layer style’s the problem and it’s adding the wrong sort of texture, you can right click on the layer style icon and choose “Scale Effects…” to adjusting the scale of the layer style if it is the wrong size for your stitches.

    If the color change seems to be the problem, try doing it the same color as the tutorial then adding a hue/saturation adjustment layer on top to change it to the color you want.

    Hope something there was useful! :-)

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