Summary: Learn how to give text a ghostly, supernatural look to it in Photoshop using a couple of simple blur filters!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Text Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Text Effects tutorial, we'll learn how to give text a ghostly, supernatural look to it using a couple of simple blur filters. I'll be using Photoshop CS5 throughout the tutorial but any recent version of Photoshop will work.

Here's what the final result will look like:

Not what you're looking for? Check out our other Text Effects tutorials!

New! Download our Photoshop tutorials as convenient, print-ready PDFs!

Let's get started!

Step 1: Rasterize The Type

Here's the document I'm starting with, which is just the word "BLUR" typed in white in front of a solid black background. I used Arial Bold for the font:

If we look in the Layers panel, we see the Type layer sitting above the black Background layer:

Make sure the Type layer is selected in the Layers panel (selected layers are highlighted in blue), then go up to the Layer menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen, choose Rasterize, then choose Type:

"Rasterizing" type just means we're converting it from editable text into pixels, which we need to do before Photoshop will let us apply any filters to it. Nothing will appear to have changed in the document window, but we can see in the Layers panel that the Type layer has become a normal pixel-based layer:

Step 2: Make Three Copies Of The Layer

We need to make three copies of our rasterized text, so go up to the Layer menu, choose New, then choose Layer via Copy, or press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to access the same command with the faster keyboard shortcut:

Either way tells Photoshop to make a copy of the layer and place it above the original:

Do the same thing two more times, either by choosing Layer > New > Layer via Copy twice or by pressing Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) twice, although the keyboard shortcut is much faster. When you're done, you should have 4 text layers, plus the Background layer on the bottom:

Step 3: Select The Original Text Layer

Click on the original text layer in the Layers panel (the one directly above the Background layer) to select it:

Step 4: Apply The Motion Blur Filter

Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, then choose Motion Blur:

This opens Photoshop's Motion Blur dialog box. Let's start by adding a vertical motion blur to the text. Change the Angle of the blur to 90°, then begin dragging the Distance slider at the bottom of the dialog box towards the right to increase the amount of blurring. Keep an eye on the document window as you drag the slider to judge the results. I'm going to set my Distance value to around 150 pixels which I think looks good with my image, but the value you use may be different depending on the size and resolution of your document:

When you're done, click OK to close out of the dialog box. Your vertical motion blur effect should look similar to this:

Step 5: Select The Layer Above It

Click on the layer above the original text layer in the Layers panel (the layer that says "copy" after its name) to select it:

Step 6: Apply The Motion Blur Filter Again

Press Ctrl+Alt+F (Win) / Command+Option+F (Mac) on your keyboard. This is a quick way to access the last filter we used, which in our case was the Motion Blur filter. Photoshop will re-open the filter's dialog box for us so we can make any changes we need before the filter is applied. This time, we'll add a horizontal motion blur, so change the Angle to 0°. You can leave the Distance option set to the same value you used last time:

Click OK to close out of the dialog box. Photoshop applies a horizontal motion blur to the layer: