Halo Over Text with Photoshop

1. Open a new Photoshop document, create a new layer, and call it "ring". Choose the Elliptical Marquee tool, and click and drag a nice, big circle that fills most of the screen, holding down Shift to make it a perfect circle. Now, hold down the Option/Alt key and drag a smaller circle within the first one to cut that selection out of the middle. This can get tricky; you must keep Option/Alt held down with your left hand, and use your other hand to manipulate the mouse, and when you need to move your inner circle as you draw it, you can use your left hand thumb to hold down the space bar to adjust the position. Once you have a relatively thin ring of selection, let go of your mouse. Now, make sure you have the ring layer selected, choose a yellow foreground color with the color picker, and choose Edit, Fill, Foreground Color from the menu.

 

2. Next, with the ring layer selected, choose the Layer Style button at the bottom of the Layers pallet and select Bevel and Emboss. Under Structure, change the Style to Pillow Emboss, the Depth to 710, the Size to 250 and Soften to 10. In the Shading area, change the Gloss Contour to Sawtooth 1, and select a dark, warm brown for the Shadow Mode. Now, select Outer Glow within the same Layer Style dialog box. In the Structure, change the Blend Mode to Hard Light, set the Opacity to 80, and make sure your color is yellow. Change the Spread to 60. the Size to 100 and the Range to 100. Lastly, select the Satin Layer Style, Change the Blend Mode to Normal, the Opacity to 75 and the color to White.

3. Change the Opacity of the ring layer to 50%. Add a new layer above the ring layer and use the Elliptical Marquee tool again, as you did above, to select the entire ring shape, with the center cut out. Choose Select>Modify>Feather, and feather the selection 100 px. Choose Edit, Fill, Foreground Color to fill the selection with yellow.

4. Deselect, delete the Background layer and choose Merge Visable from the drop-down menu in the Layers pallet. Now, you can use the Transform tool to rotate, skew or change the perspective of your halo. Choose the Type tool and the font Impact, size 100, then type each letter of the word "ascend" on it's own layer, and move the letters with the Move tool to look like stairsteps. Open the Style pallet and choose Text Effect from the Styles drop-down menu. With the "d" type layer selected, click on the "Chiseled Sky" style. To copy this effect to each letter, hold down Option/Alt and drag the layer style to the layer that you'd like to apply the style. Move the halo layer so that it sits above all the other type layers, except for "d". Add a cloudy sky as the bottom layer.