Create the Indiana Jones text effect in Photoshop
Now that the adventures of Indiana Jones have hit cinemas worldwide for the fourth time, I thought it would be a good idea to get in the Indy mood with a simple yet appealing Photoshop tutorial. Just follow these easy steps and you’ll be able to create an Indiana Jones text effect in a snap.
1. First of all, we need some material, namely the background picture and the Indy text font. I used an old map from the free stock photo site Stock Xchng for the background, and the SF Fedora font you can download from Dafont.
2. Now it’s time to work: open a blank document with transparent background and write any text you like with the Indy font. Then click on the Warp text button (see screenshot) and apply an arc effect, modifying the default parameters to make it more similar to the original movie title. In this case I used +12% Bend, -26% Horizontal distortion and +2% Vertical distortion.
3. Time to apply some effects: right click on the text layer and choose Blending options. We’re going to use Drop shadow, Gradient overlay and Stroke.
- Drop Shadow: tweak the shadow effect according to the screenshot.
- Gradient overlay: click on the gradient bar to open the Gradient Editor, choose a three-color pattern and replace the default colors with F9F2E6, FF881C and FF2D1C.
- Stroke: customize stroke settings as shown below
4. The text is already done, so now let’s apply it to the background image. Open your chosen image and simply copy and paste the text onto it. Resize the text with Ctrl+T if necessary. Feel free to add any other effects, like Noise (Filter > Noise > Add noise) or Film Grain (Filter > Artistic > Film Grain) to the background image to make more interesting.
Posted at 6:19 pm on Jul 8th
I instaled the font but when i go to Adobo Photoshop it doesnt have the Fedora font. So what do I do?
Posted at 7:48 am on Jul 9th
Hey Mat,
make sure Photoshop is closed when you install the fonts. You need to restart the program so that it loads the new font list - including Fedora.
Posted at 1:48 am on Sep 3rd
Awesome effect Elena!
Posted at 8:44 pm on Dec 3rd
How do I get those gradient overlay colors in (F9F2E6, etc.)?
Posted at 9:28 am on Dec 4th
Hey ducky,
once in the Blending options menu (see step 3) go to “Gradient overlay” and click on the gradient color bar to open the Gradient Editor. You’ll see a new window with several gradient options to choose from.
Select one with three colors (for example, the “Blue,Red.Yellow” one) and click on the three little colored boxes to replace the blue, red and yellow values with the three new colors: F9F2E6, FF881C and FF2D1C (you can insert these values directly into the Color picker).
Hope this helps!
Posted at 7:20 pm on Apr 2nd
I’m using a mac and Photoshop 2 I can’t open the SF Fedora font. It is a zip file. Is there a mac friendly alternative site?
Posted at 7:50 am on Apr 3rd
Hi Craig,
as far as I know, you can open ZIP files in Mac and use TTF fonts in Mac as well. Also, according to the Dafonts site (the website you download the Fedora font from), this is a Win/Mac compatible text font.
Cheers,
Elena
Posted at 12:47 am on Aug 17th
When I do it, the text is really far away from the shadow, how do you get yours so close?
Posted at 12:17 am on Sep 10th
Brilliant! Thanks so much for sharing this, I had a lot of fun recreating this style for other creative uses.