Flare’s Over-The-Top Beginner’s Guide to SFX

Version 2.1
This guide took a while to make because I realized it was going to be too long to fit on a .png, and I
had to figure out how tf I was going to format it to make it readable.

If you’re new to typesetting, don’t read this guide straight through. You won’t absorb most of it with
one read, trust me. Try each effect before moving on, or wait until you find a sfx you’re not sure how
to typeset and look for a similar example here for a walkthrough. If you’re not brand new, go ahead
and give it a read, since you’ll be able to skip anything you know and understand the rest!

V2 update: Added a bunch of new tricks, easier methods for the old tricks, and some better example
images in places I felt could use them.

V2.1 update: Fixed a few errors in the guide and cleaned up typos/leftovers from the V2 update.

Some important notes:

• This guide was made with Photoshop 2019 and Photoshop 2021, and the step-by-step
instructions will be based on those versions. If you use something else or have an older
version, some settings may be in different places or be unavailable. You should be able to
figure out which, and how to achieve the effect anyway, by googling your program or version
and using the lingo here!
• I made parts of this guide when I was still new-ish, so don’t mind the typesetting issues in
some of the pictures. I’m less stupid now, but I’m too lazy to go back and fix them.
• That said, all mistakes are my own! I am only less stupid.
• The formatting is probably wildly inconsistent because hey I’m just making this for fun and
word sucks.
• I used Wild Words on purpose to piss everyone off :D

A big thanks to RRR-gi and Misfits Scans and for putting up with my rambling and
teaching me all this in the first place! I’m sure Version 3 will be even better!

Contents
Placement ......................................................................................................................................................................3
Quick note: Leading (or the space between lines) for vertical text .......................................................................7
Effects ............................................................................................................................................................................9
Stroke (text border) ...................................................................................................................................................9
Brush stroke (fancy text border) ................................................................................................................................9
See-through text ......................................................................................................................................................12
Pattern text fill .........................................................................................................................................................14
Gradients .................................................................................................................................................................18
Interruption! Clipping masks and groups ....................................................................................................................20
Clipping masks .........................................................................................................................................................20
 Groups .....................................................................................................................................................................21
Combining effects ........................................................................................................................................................22
Two stroke effects ...................................................................................................................................................22
Stroke + outer glow .................................................................................................................................................24
Pattern fill + gradient (+ gradient half-pixel stroke) ................................................................................................25
Complex strokes ......................................................................................................................................................30
Drawing over (or under) text ...................................................................................................................................31
Random text fill effects ............................................................................................................................................32
Putting text behind stuff ..............................................................................................................................................34
Method 1: ................................................................................................................................................................34
Method 2: ................................................................................................................................................................36
Shape and letters .........................................................................................................................................................39
General tip: capital letters vs lowercase letters ...................................................................................................39
Font size ...................................................................................................................................................................39
Rotation ...................................................................................................................................................................40
Spaces ......................................................................................................................................................................40
Tracking ...................................................................................................................................................................41
Vertical and horizontal scale....................................................................................................................................42
Baseline shift............................................................................................................................................................43
Paths ........................................................................................................................................................................45
Default warping .......................................................................................................................................................47
Perspective ..........................................................................................................................................................48
Skew.........................................................................................................................................................................49
Individually setting letters .......................................................................................................................................50
Convert to shape + distort/warp .................................................................................................................................52
The black cursor .......................................................................................................................................................54
Convert to smart object ...........................................................................................................................................56
Beyond the guide: hand-drawn sfx ..............................................................................................................................57
The End ........................................................................................................................................................................57
Placement
When a sound effect has been redrawn out, your best bet is to put the translated sfx roughly where
the old one was. What about when a sound effect has not been redrawn out? In that case, how you
place the sfx depends on a few important traits of the sfx.

1: Is the sound effect massive? If the answer is yes, your life is a lot easier.

For thick as hell sfx: put the translation inside the original. You can do some skewing or
sizing things to make it look neater.
 For not-thick or weird sfx: Most of these have a nice shelf to set the sfx TL on.
Alternatively, you can place the sfx beside a long edge, etc.
2. If the answer to 1 is no:

You don’t want to place the sfx TL somewhere it will cover the background, but putting it directly over
the JP sound effect usually looks bad. What’s more, the shelves on these often aren’t big enough to
hold the whole sfx ☹ You have to get creative here. It’s generally best to try and make the
translation ‘blend in’ as much as possible, but you can still make it look pretty good.
A special exception to the “don’t cover the original sfx” rule is “za” (ザ). It almost has the perfect
shelf, and if there aren’t any better options… it’s better than nothing!

Quick note: Leading (or the space between lines) for vertical text

I don’t recommend using the actual vertical type tool (or vertical text, if you can help it). You can
accomplish the same things with the horizontal tool, and you don’t have to remember all the different
controls. Also, the text will never invert itself!

The one very important difference is that you’ll have to change the default line spacing, or leading.
Adjust the auto leading until the letters look spaced naturally:

Default preset leading Adjusted leading

Ellipses will take some additional work. They’ll

need less than half of the leading letters will
because they sit at the bottom of the line area. If
you have vertical text with an ellipsis, I suggest
changing the ellipsis leading manually.
Effects
In general, it’s best not to use these if they’re not a part of the original sfx.

Stroke (text border)

Starting with the easiest one, add a stroke whenever your text is on or crosses a background that
isn’t white. This includes speed lines and bubble edges (text should only ever cross the edges of a
bubble if the bubble is really thin)! Sfx that don’t have a stoke in the raws are the only exception, but
they’re rare. You can access the stroke effect by going to Layer -> Layer Style -> Stroke, but since
you’ll be doing this a lot, you can also keep stroke effects handy with the effects window.
Once you have a text layer with a certain pixel
stroke, click the “new style” button circled in the
picture here and you’ll be able to save it. Then you
can access it whenever you open the effects menu!
The first 15 effects saved in this image are just black
and white strokes.
One thing to be aware of with saved effects: if you
work on raws with different resolutions, the settings
will change slightly. For example, 1px stroke effect
saved at 72pdi will be a 4px stroke effect at 300dpi.

Brush stroke (fancy text border)

But wait, there’s more! Sometimes you might run into text that’s got a crunchy-looking stroke, or a
fuzzy stroke, or an uneven stroke. Fonts can only help you out so much in that case, and you’re not
going to find a solution in the layer style window, unfortunately. But where there’s a will, there’s a
way! Here’s an example of an uneven stroke that’s impossible to duplicate with a regular stroke:

This looks ok, but to hell with ok! We’re here to

figure out how to do Photoshop magic at the
expense of sleep!
First, pick yourself a font, get the text to a size you like, warp it, and so on. The text should be
finished before you make this fancy stroke. Once you’ve done that, make a new layer. It can go
above or below the text layer. Let’s put it below this text (you’ll see the difference soon). Once all of
that is ready, right click on the text layer and select “create work path.”

You’ll get those little dots you see in the picture. Next, select the new layer you made a few
minutes ago. From there, click over to the Paths window.
Select the brush tool and click on the work path in the paths later. The solid hollow circle at the
bottom of the window should light up – if you click it, you’ll have yourself a brush stroke!

You can also do this with a shape. Select the shape layer in question, then over to the paths tab.
Select the black cursor tool, which I’ll talk about more later.

Click on the shape path in the paths layer with this tool, then select
the dotted outline along the bottom of the window. Finally, select the
solid circle with the dots on it to generate your work path!
If the stroke is on top, it’ll go inside the text as well:

The hard part of this is picking a brush. Anyone familiar with the artistic tools will likely have an
easier time with it. You can download many brush packs for PS online – play around and see what
works!

See-through text

Ok, now that we know how to put text behind stuff, let’s see some other cool things we can do with
layers.

So, we can put our square font in and add a stroke. Easy. How do we make the text see-though
now?
Answer: Open the layer styles panel and make sure “blending options” is selected in the menu on
the left (it should be the landing page by default). Once there, look for “advanced blending options”
in the center panel. Move the percentage slider all the way to the left. Tah-dah! The sfx is now see-
though!

(As you can see here, there are actually three stroke effects on the text, so expect to hear more
about this ‘sfx’ later!)
Pattern text fill

This sfx uses another layer style, and though I’m going to talk about the warping effect here in
another section, I wanted to talk about more layer styles first. The original sfx was this greyish color.
But if you just make it grey, it looks kinda weird, right?

The original sfx has a pattern, albeit an almost imperceptible one. Here’s how to duplicate it:
Select the marquee tool.

Now, highlight part of the pattern inside the text. Got to edit -> define pattern.

This is the trickiest part, really. You have to be careful what you select so that the final outcome
looks normal rather than bunched up and weird. We’ll use another sfx with a pattern fill for a more
obvious example:
It’s incredibly tempting to select a pattern here that looks like a 4 or 5 on a six-sided die, but if you do
that it doesn’t really look like evenly-spaced dots anymore.

Try to select as few dots as you can to make an identical pattern. For a polka-dot pattern, that’s two.
Much better.

For the grey pattern, just try to avoid any really obvious darker dots and cross your fingers. It still
takes me a few tries to nail that one. (I’ve since discovered that creating a gray layer and adding 2%
noise does the trick, no pattern required! Learn more in the combining effects section.)

Once you have your pattern set, go up to the layers tab and select layer style->pattern overlay.
Select the pattern you just made, and you’re done!
Gradients

One other layer style you might want to use eventually is the gradient overlay. Applying one is
almost the same as applying a pattern overlay. Go to layers -> layer style -> gradient overlay.
There’s an additional menu that takes some practice to get the hang of, but the default will most
likely be what you need.

Angle is the control you’ll need the most – it’ll change where the gradient starts and ends on the text.
Try moving the line in the circle around to see what I mean. Most of these controls can come in
handy, so check them out when you get the chance.
If you click on the bar next to the word “gradient” you’ll be able to change the colors! This is the
bottom of the menu. You probably won’t need it much, but just in case:

If everything looks good, hit ok and-

Gradient!
Interruption! Clipping masks and groups
Before we move on to next this section, we should quickly cover two Photoshop functions you can
use to your advantage in various ways.
Clipping masks

When you set a layer as a clipping mask, that means the layer will only be visible on the layer it is
clipped to. Here’s an example:

Right click on the painted layer and select

“Create Clipping Mask,” making sure your
text is the layer directly below.
This has many uses, but for your purposes as a TS, you’ll mostly want to do this with strange,
random text effects and for creating complex strokes with patterns and gradients, which I’ll cover at
the end of the next section.
What’s important to know now is that any layer you create as a clipping mask does not register as
part of the text, so it can apply to text effects.

Groups

Groups are useful if you know you need to put the same stroke on lots of text, or you want a quick
way to look at the raws, or you want to avoid math (more on that in the next section). When you start
combining effects, however, you have to consider how those effects will interact if they’re applied to
the group or to the layer.
The most noticeable one is what happens when you apply a clipping mask to a group that contains a
stroked text layer.

The mask is applied to the stroke, too. Oops.

Make sure to apply the strokes on the same level as the clipping mask if you want the stroke to be
visible!
Groups and their behavior can be very useful if you want to have two stroke effects, however, so
let’s continue with~
Combining effects
*This section is very 2019-2021 oriented. Much older versions of PS (like CS6) do not allow you to
have multiple effects on text unless you rasterize the layer style after each one.
Two stroke effects

Not too hard - with the text layer selected, go up to the top and select layer -> layer style -> stroke,
and you should see a little plus sign next to “stroke” in the window that pops up. Click on that and
you should immediately have a second stroke effect.

You have to make the second stroke bigger than the first if you want it to be visible – it’s a
subtraction problem, I’m afraid. If the first stroke is 3 px, and the second is 5, the second stroke will
look like it’s 2px. You could also add the text to a group folder (even if it’s the only layer in the group)
and add a 2px stroke to the group itself to get the same effect.
Finally, remember that “High spirits” text from earlier in this guide?

This has two outer strokes and an inner stroke. As you set up each one, there’s an option to change
the stroke position, and the “inside” option puts the stroke inside the text.

Inner strokes are also somewhat common on sfx with fill patterns – even the grey ones! Sometimes
you may want to add a 1 or 2px inner stroke, assuming it’s there in the raws.
Stroke + outer glow

Outer glows are good when the redraws make you want to cry, or when there’s an outer glow on the
text in the raws. There are two ways to do this: with noise and without. Either way works, though a
little noise is common in manga

First, add a thin stroke so you don’t

have to try to make the outer glow
double as a stroke for readability. Next,
apply your outer glow. You’ll just want
to play with the sliders here until you
get the effect you want, since outer
glows are heavily dependent on text
sizes and how much noise you’d prefer.
Here are the settings I used for the sfx
example for reference!
Pattern fill + gradient (+ gradient half-pixel stroke)

Say you have a gradient text fill… that also has a pattern! This is actually more common than a plain
gradient. For most styles you can just apply both a pattern overlay and a gradient overlay. Problem
is, you need the pattern first.

Sometimes you can take the top row of the pattern and define it without issue! Other times you can’t,
because it’ll look something like this:

Here’s where having some experience will come in handy. There are a finite number of patterns,
commonly called screentones, used in manga. Look around the page or chapter you’re TSing to see
if the gradient-free pattern is used elsewhere, or check out screentone resources online
(quicksandscans’s resources page and Mangadex have some, to name a few). To make the
gradient apply to the pattern (rather than cover it) set the blending mode to multiply (if you want it to
darken the pattern) or screen (if you want it to lighten the pattern). Set two gradient overlays if you
want to do both. Difference may also come in handy for particularly irritating screentones.
For the imperceptible gray pattern, I found that adding noise solved this problem. Now, this is a
relatively minor effect that no one will blame you for ignoring. But, for no apparent reason, it drives
me insane to have a perfectly smooth gradient in an otherwise not-smooth page!! So we’re about to
dive into some nitty-gritty details of How To Fix The Thing.

There is another way to add a gradient (or pattern) effect to text – fill layers!

To create a gradient fill layer, first use the rectangular selection tool to select all of the text you want
to cover. This will define the start and end points of your gradient (this step is not necessary for
pattern fill layers). Then go up to layer -> new fill layer -> gradient. Click ok without changing
anything on the first window. In the next, use the eyedropper tool to set the start and end colors,
then mess with it as you see fit. Once you have something you like, hit ok. Now click on the new
gradient fill layer and set it as a clipping mask to the text you want the gradient on.
Great! So we’re in the same place you could have reached much faster with a layer style. Now we
get detailed! Select the gradient fill layer and go to filter -> noise -> add noise.

A window should pop up and let you define your noise values. For this particular sfx, 1% uniform
noise looked the best. Play around with the settings to find the closest match!
Hmm, this looks like it could use one of those inner strokes I mentioned earlier. But white doesn’t
really work. Neither does gray, since the inner stroke is white at the bottom. Man, it’d be nice if we
could make the stroke be a gradient, huh?
Aha! That looks nice. Except it’s either too big or too small at 1 or 2px, and photoshop won’t accept
half-pixel values for a stroke! Let’s trick it into making one.

Select the third stroke layer. Change it from “inside” to “center”. Increase the pixel width to 3px. This
will place the stroke directly on the edge of the word… so that 1.5 pixels are on the inside and 1.5
pixels are on the outside! Because this stroke is the lowest “stroke layer,” the outer strokes
completely hide our little trick.

*Note that you will need two colors at 100% opacity on stroke gradients. Otherwise they show the
page behind the text!
So that’s more than you probably wanted to know about this sfx. Don’t worry, you’ll see it again
soon. First, let’s check out more cool stuff you can do with clipping masks!
Complex strokes

Remember when I said strokes were easy? Let’s change that! Sometimes you might run into a
stroke like this:

This is a pattern stroke that’s darker near the edges of the

sfx and fades out as it moves away. Good news! We
actually know how to deal with this already.

First, set your text to be see-through and add an outer glow. Put that text in a group, then create a
pattern fill layer outside of the group. Set the pattern fill as a clipping mask on the group.

Nice! The inner edge could look a little smoother – try adding a small inner glow to the text to fix that.
Tah-dah! You can play with the glow effects to make the stroke bigger or smaller or darker or lighter.
If you need your text to be black or some other color, I recommend duplicating the text layer and
placing it under the group.

Drawing over (or under) text

If you find you just can’t match the outer edge effects of a raw sfx with
any of the methods above, it may be time to practice your artistic talents.
This is extremely straightforward because it all depends on how good
you are at free-handing text effects. This on the left? Was just the brush
tool on a new blank layer on top of the text. I would recommend
rasterizing and erasing parts of the stroke for this particular sfx. I did that
in the chapter release, but the text otherwise looks way worse, so I’ll just
and use the one I re-did for the guide~!

If you get lots more

practice than I have,
you can do really
cool stuff like this!
You may also encounter sfx like this:

And while I hate to say it, a brush stroke probably isn’t going to save you
here. Place a new blank layer (underneath the text this time) and go ham
with the brush tool.
Random text fill effects

Sometimes there’s no pattern at all to text fills, it’s just random scribbles or dots or scratches. Like
this, for example:

Don’t worry about matching it line for line, that’s impossible. Pen scribbles are, by definition,
completely random lines. All you need to do is mimic the look.
There are a bunch of similar effects that you can use the brush tool for. Here’s another common one:

The dots you see here punch straight through the text to show the background. This is a trick you
can do with Method 1 from the next section!
Putting text behind stuff
You’re gonna find a lot of text that’s behind characters, obscured by other effects, or hidden in some
way that you’ll need to try to duplicate. There are two methods you can use depending on how much
text you need to hide and how you need to hide it – and neither of them are rasterizing the text!!

Method 1:

First, the quick way for when you don’t need to hide too much. As an example, the first two letters of
“bang” need to be behind the speech bubble and Irumi in this panel:

Step one, make a group and put the text layer inside it. With the group selected, click the mask
button at the bottom of the layers panel to add a layer mask. This is different from the clipping masks
we just covered!

Keep the layer mask selected like in the second image, then select the brush tool. Set the color to
black, and make sure to have a hard brush tip set.
 Once you’re ready, draw over the text you want to hide!

Tip for the interested: if you don’t use a group, your mask won’t hide the stroke – so the stroke will
distort along with the text.

Text starts to look rough when you do this, which can be useful when you need it!
But say you’re typesetting multiple messages on a phone, or the outline of the thing the text needs to
be behind is complicated, or you want to apply an effect around the hidden thing – method 2 is here
for you!
Method 2:

This method takes a bunch of steps, but it’s more flexible than the first method so it can sometimes
make your life easier. First, put the clean or redraw layers into a group. This is good for typesetting,
too, so you can look at the raws quickly whenever you need to.

Next, copy the entire group AND the background. Now, combine the copied group and the copied
background layer, so you have one layer that contains the entire final image, but you still have the
original redraw and background layers too.
Move this layer above the text you want behind the stuff.

This will completely hide your text, but not for too long. Select the magic want tool.
Click on the area you want to put the text in, then hit delete.

And the text will be obscured by the edges of the bubble/paper/character/objects!

You might have to break out the eraser tool if you encounter something that’s too open, since the
magic wand tool might select too much.

One last note - if you add a stroke or glow to the new image layer you made, you can make the text
stop a little sooner or fade it out as it gets close to the edge.
Shape and letters
These effects can be used even when they aren’t in the raws. The main thing you want to consider
here is what the sound effect is for.
General tip: capital letters vs lowercase letters

A pretty obvious and straightforward issue: should the sfx be all caps? You can use your own
judgement here, but in general, if a sfx is for a BIG LOUD NOISE it should be in caps (think of
BOOM, POW, BAM). Similarly, if the sfx is for some angry motion (snarl, for example) caps can help
emphasize the rage in said motion. For soft noises like whisper or swish, lowercase will
automatically make many readers imagine the sound quieter.

Font size

An obvious change, sometimes a sfx will look better if you lower the font size with each letter. A lot
of other effects can be complimented by this one.

You can accomplish something similar with the distortion effects I’ll explain a little later.
Rotation

Another basic effect, rotating your sfx is sfx 101. Tilt them a little, tilt them a lot! Don’t tilt them to 90-
degree angles or upside down, though. That’s hard to read. For basic sfx like “chatter” and
“murmur,” this is plenty, but you can do more if the mood strikes.

Spaces

You can do some fun things just with spaces, especially if your text is center-aligned. You can create
simple shapes with vertical text by adding spaces to the right or left of a letter, or place text on either
side of a character or object.

Use this in moderation, but it does look great when you do it right!
Tracking

Tracking is the fancy term for the exact distance between letters in a word. You should leave it at
some default for your bubble text, but sfx are the wild west! Do with them as you please. Sometimes
you might be happy with your font and text size/scale, but it just won’t reach the edges of the raw
text the way you want.

There’s no need to comb back through your fonts, though – you can just set the letters a little further
apart!

Go up to the character window and click on the box with VA next to it. Set that to some number you
like, and tweak it until you’re happy with the distance.

I use this mostly for arced text, but use it wherever you think it would look good. Add a brush stroke
and it’s good to go!
Vertical and horizontal scale

This is a pretty easy change. Setting the values too high or too low with can make the text totally
unreadable, so that’s your primary limitation. Your max and mins for both should be about 130% and
80%, respectively, but some fonts are readable at higher or lower numbers. Especially bold fonts
can look good at as much as 300% height and/or 50% width.

I find I reduce the horizontal scale quite often now for basically anything (even default dialogue text,
though that must be uniform throughout the manga!) Don’t be shy about getting to know these
settings!
Baseline shift

This will move the letters up or down depending on how you change it. For diagonal sfx, change the
baseline shift in equal increments. These go down by -20 pt each letter, so C is set to zero, R is set
to -20, A is set to -40, and so on and so forth. You will often want to reduce the tracking on diagonal
text so that the letters don’t look too far apart. Just put a negative sign on the number in the VA box
and you’ll be good to go.

You can also do neat things by alternating between positive and negative shifts:
One other thing baseline shifts can help with is making rotated text look less vertical. Here’s what I
mean:

I don’t recommend vertical text ever!! But if you run into one rare instance when you have some
really limited space to place a little bit of floating text, this can help keep the text readable. You will
primarily only need this for small floating text – large text rarely needs to be rotated much to fit
anywhere and is more readable when it is rotated.
Paths

Sometimes this happens:

And if you don’t know how to handle it, it’ll just look like a nightmare. Good news! This is one of the
easier shaping things to achieve.
Select the curvature pen tool and make sure to set it to “path.”

Now, trace a line along the wavy text. You’ll get the best results if you place a point at the top and
bottom of each wave. If it moves off of the raw text line, just try adding another point between the
two you’ve already set by clicking on the line between them. Note that I turned the path thickness
way up so it’d be extra visible for the guide, it’ll probably be really thin when you use it.

Ok, this done, go grab the text tool and hover over the path you just made. You should see a super
tiny curved line pop up over the cursor when you do so.

Yes, this is hard to see. It actually looks even worse on my laptop screen.
If it doesn’t come up, just go over to the paths window and select the work path there. You have to
be able to see the little squares on the line to type on it. Once you click, you should see… basically
nothing!

One tiny little L where you clicked. And it’s upside down. Thanks, PS. Alright, let’s fix this. Go select
the greatest too ever made, the black cursor (we’ll come back to this, oh yes we will).

Now go click and hold on the text. Now you can pull it to the other side of the line, and most
importantly, determine the start and end points of the text!

The white + is where the line starts and the black ⦻ is where the line ends. Drag the black ⦻ to the
end of the path.

Done! Well, not really, you’ll obviously want to tweak the text and maybe add a brush stroke etc. I
tend to try and make the tracking look more consistent over the path, but that takes a while. I
manually change it for chunks of the text until I’m satisfied. I’ll probably figure out a better at some
point – look for it in version 3!
Default warping

Back to that shine sfx – it’s also warped! This is a basic arc warp, which you can find in the top
toolbar when you have the text layer and the text tool selected.

Note that you can not do this if the faux bold setting it selected. It’s ok to turn faux bold off to warp
the text, since most of the warping effects add some boldness anyway.

Twist and fish are quite good for nsfw manga, but you’ll use arc a lot in everything. I generally like to
keep this under ±40, but sometimes more looks good. Rotating arced text can make it have a sort of
drooping effect, which is useful when you need it. Highly arced text can get hard to read, but if you
add ~±10 vertical skew (the V in the warping bar) to the warp you can recover the readability.

Also, if you change the effect to horizontal, it has this really neat effect that looks amazing for certain
types of sounds.
Other nice defaults are flag, rise, inflate or squeeze. Again, I like to keep these below ±40, but see
what looks best.

Perspective

Technically you can use the controls on default warping for this. Don’t use it too much for shounen
manga, but in certain, hmm, less work-friendly manga, we’ll say – apply liberally! It alters the default
warping in neat ways and can look really good once you get the hang of it.

But for text on signs etc., using the skew command is actually a better method.
Skew

Hit control + T with the text layer selected, then right-click and select skew.

You can do a lot with this, but it’ll really make more sense if you whip the edges around for a few
minutes and see for yourself. Skewing can increase the italicization or stretch and compress your
text in interesting ways! It’s also great for perspective. Click on any of the dots around the edges to
see what you can do.

Increase the italics.

Or try reverse italics!

Individually setting letters

Sometimes it’s easier to get the effects you want by setting each letter as its own text layer. Letter
placement is the name of the game here, since you can’t always get one letter directly under another
while the one after that is halfway across the page, etc. – or at least, this way is much easier.

Each letter can have any one of the warping effects mentioned above, or multiple effects, or different
effects, even (be careful with that though).

You have two options when adding a stroke or other non-warping effects to text like this. You can
add it to each letter, or you can group the letters and add it to the group. Adding it to each letter will
make the stroke show up when the letters overlap, like so:
Whereas adding it to a group will make the stroke effects go away when the letters overlap:

If you check the raws you’ll notice that “crumple” doesn’t quite look like the original sfx. What it does
look like, however, is something crumpled up! That’s what I mean when I say that the most important
aspect of using the letter effects is to try and match the action creating the sound.
Convert to shape + distort/warp

A bit more artistic than the other methods, this will allow you to yank the text all over the place and
make it do whatever you want, defaults be damned. Right-click on your text layer and select “convert
to shape.”
Then hit control + T and right click again to select either distort or warp. Distort will change the area
the text takes up, while warp will change the shape of the actual letters.

Distorted text Warped text

You have lots of options when you start warping!

You can click on the dots or the edges, And you can click anywhere in the middle!

!!Warning!!
If you do this too many times to the same line of text, the text will start to look blurry!
Watch out for that, and try to do as much of your warping in one go as you can!

(This issue is much more apparent in older versions of photoshop. Those running newer versions
may not encounter the blur at all.)
The black cursor

So let’s say you convert your text, but you decide it would just look way better if the letters were
further apart. Or maybe you should have used a larger baseline shift value, or maybe you just wish
you could set letters individually and warp them as a group without all the extra steps it takes to
combine the layers. The black cursor is here for you!

When you have your shape layer selected and click on the magic black cursor, you should see this:

That’s the shape path marker thing from way back in the brush stroke section. It’s ugly so click
someplace else. Now, click on just one of the letters.

Take it for a walk.

It can go anywhere!! It’s freeeeeeee!

And that’s not all, you can select a few at a time with shift + click!

And you can transform them independently of the rest!!

This is especially good for sfx that are split on either side of a thing, since you’ll be able to warp them
in different directions without issue!
Convert to smart object

Note that you cannot edit your text as text after converting it to a shape. All is not lost, however –
you can still edit your font, your spelling, anything you like if you convert to a smart object!

Just right click on your layer and select “convert to smart object,” then open the properties window
and select “edit contents.”

Once you do, the text should open up in a new tab for editing. Just save the text to update the smart
object back on the original page.

The only thing you can’t do with a smart object is use the black cursor to move the letters around as
you please, which is why I like shapes better, but both have their merits! Depending on your style,
you might find you like smart objects better!

!!Warning!!
If you make too many changes to a smart object, the text will start to look blurry!

(This issue is still present in newer versions of Photoshop.)

Beyond the guide: hand-drawn sfx
Sometimes you might run into a sfx that just refuses to look even close to the raws no matter what
you do. Sometimes you might see a sfx in a manga that looks amazing, but you can’t think of a way
to match it with any TS trick up your sleeve. There’s a good chance that was hand-drawn!
All of the same rules apply when hand-drawing. Try to match the size and look of the raw font, and
try to match the idea or motion of the sound. You can get brush packs online to help you with
matching the fonts.
Here are some hand-drawing 101 tips I can give:
Make a new layer for each letter (you can do this at first while you’re getting used to it, or just keep
doing it forever – totally up to you! I’ve seen both from experienced sfx drawers).
Keep your letter layers in a group to keep them together and out of your way as you go.
Apply a stroke before you start drawing to make sure your brush doesn’t look like crap at the edges.
Sometimes the brush or resolution of your raws can make the edges look like a chainsaw blade.
That stands out a lot and should be avoided! You can usually fix it by altering some brush settings or
picking a different brush.
Use some non-zero value of smoothing for the brush tool.
I like to say TS is the “math” of scanlation. It’s very technical; you have to deal with spatial relations
constantly and there are tons numerical settings that need handling, so analytical minds are lured
into TS easily. But this is where TS becomes art. Not all TSes will ever need to do it or learn to do it.
It’s cool, but not often necessary.

The End
Phew! That’s a lot. This is the end of the guide, though! These are my admittedly art- and
photoshop-illiterate methods, there are probably smoother ways to go about some of this, and you
may find them as you go.
There are lots of cool things you can do once you get the hang of all these techniques. And there’s
always more to learn! I just picked up the smart object trick last week and I’ve been doing this as a
not-quite-full-time job during Covid for a year now. Check out some official manga for more
examples, or just keep an eye out for neat sfx things and think about how and when you could use
them