Smoky night effect

In this tutorial we'll be creating a smoky night effect on text to give it an eerie supernatural sort of feel. It's a good exercise in using the Wave distortion filter...

Step 1

The first thing we need for our image is a background. We're going to use a quick star-sky background. There are lots of tutorials around for this effect, and it's actually a simple two-step process: clouds + noise.

So on a new blank canvas, start by choosing a dark blue color - #18323a - and black and then go to Filter > Render > Clouds.

Step 2

Now create a new layer, fill it with black, and go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and use values roughly as shown below.

Step 3

Now that is way too much noise, so go to Image > Adjustment > Levels (or Ctrl+L) and bring those sliders together until you see most of the 'stars' vanish as shown.