How to create a delicious and yummy Chocolate dripping text effect in Photoshop

By Rajasegar Chandiran on July 5th, 2011

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a realistic Chocolate dripping text effect in Photoshop using very simple and effective techniques. We will play with some layer styles and filters to create our text, the steps are much easier to follow, this tutorial requires no user expertise, even a first timer in Photoshop can create mouth-watering text effects based on this. So feeling hungry, let’s get ready for a treat!

Before going into the tutorial, let us see how the final image will look like.

Step 1: New document

Create a new document of size 1600 by 1200 px with white as the background color.

Now we will prepare our background for the text, so unlock the default background layer by double clicking on it in the Layers Panel, and give it any appropriate name, the background layer is now ready for the layer styles. Apply a Gradient Overlay style for the layer using the following settings.

The Gradient color starts from #d0c9c8 to #ece3ce.

Step 2: Add Text

Now add some text using any smooth rounded font, i am using the standard “Arial Rounded” with the size of about 350 pt of any color, since we are going to add gradient overlays to the text , the color doesn’t matter.

Step 3: Layer Styles for the Text

Apply the following layer styles for the text we just added.

Drop Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay

The Gradient colors are from #cccccc to #eeeeee.

This is the effect we so far obtained.

Step 4: Add the Chocolate dripping

Now comes the important part of the tutorial, the chocolate dripping effect. There are many ways you can achieve this kind of effect, using the Liquify filter to create a dripping like effect, or using the Smudge tool or even using the Pen tool to directly draw this effect above the text and apply the layer styles later on. But these ways require great skills and patience to achieve the effect, since this tutorial’s sole purpose is to teach some new techniques and experimenting with the filters and layer styles, i decided to go on with a new approach.

The approach starts with this, first we create a new rectangle structure about half the size of the text, place it directly above the text layer and apply some distort filters like the Wave Filter to the structure, and nudge it a little to get the dripping effects on the text and later mask it on by the text itself. Finally we apply the layer styles to finish this effect. Sounds easy, okay lets go on.

Grab the Custom Shapes (U) tool, draw a rectangle about half the size of the text. The rectangle should be wide enough and tall enough to cover the upper half of the text completely.

Now go to Filter -> Distort -> Wave. Apply the wave filter using the following settings. The Wave type must be selected as the Sine, the important thing to be noted here is you cannot get the same effect as mine everytime, since they are randomly generated at wavelengths, so be sure to play around with the settings.

Once you applied your effect , nudge the wave structure along horizontally about 4-5 pixels, right or left, using the Move(V) tool, till you feel satisfied that the drippings are appropriately placed over the text. This is the effect so far.

Now we have to mask our wave layer using the text layer, first select the pixels of the text layer, by Ctrl + Clicking (Cmd for Mac) on the layer thumbnail in the Layers Panel, then select the wave layer, click on the Add Layer Mask in the bottom of the Layers Panel. This is the text with the wave layer masked out.