If you have looked at some of the other actions that we have done, like blood, slime and hatchet, then you knew I wasn't gonna be happy until I got to blow something up.  Well, put your ear plugs in and watch out for flying debris, because here's The Explosion Action.

I don't know why these type treatment effects are so much fun, but they are.  I guess I like them because I've always been a big fan of movie poster design and all the cool type treatments that artists come up with for the movie titles.  Especially action and disaster films.  When I was a kid, I had a movie poster in my room from the film 'Earthquake' starring Charlton Hesston and George Kennedy.  It had the word EARTHQUAKE spelled out in crumbling, concrete letters, going diagonally down the page.  Around the letters were falling buildings, bridges and debris, a breaking dam with gushing water, people and automobiles dropping from the sky!  I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen!  At school, I would sit in class and draw just about every word I could think of in crumbling, earthquake like letters, including my name at the top of my assignments.  (My teachers used to love the crap out of that.)

I have also always had a great appreciation for the more simpler forms of type treatments, like those found in really clever logo or package designs.  I'm always standing around in movie theaters, video stores, grocery stores, studying the way type treatments are used in everything from cereal boxes to aspirin containers.  I look at neon lights in store windows, the little chrome letters on the trunks of cars, lighted signs above the stores in shopping malls, continually on the lookout for new ideas.

Anyway, I have seen this effect done several different ways over the past few years, in different PhotoShop tips and tricks WebSites and books, and I thought I would give one a try that included some nice crumbling letters and flying debris.  You can never have too much of that stuff!!  This one creates a nice effect that makes it look as if the explosion has just begun to rip through the letters.

There are quite a few different filter effects in this one, applied in different combinations, to create the final result.  This thing uses everything from Polar Coordinates, Ocean Ripple and Wind to Guassian, Radial Blur and Noise.  There is also quite a bit of use of Channels, Curves, Color Balance and Blending Options.  You may want to set the number of steps in your History Palette up to about 100 and run through this one backwards after it is complete.

To begin with, download the explosion action here and load it into your Action Palette.  You will want to start with a fairly large size document here because you need plenty of room on all sides for the explosion.

I started with a new 8x8 inch, 72dpi file.  I pasted in some type that I had tweaked a bit in Illustrator to enhance the 'Blowing Up Effect.'

Left is my original, resized for the Web, with a border to show the proportions on all four sides.

I then used the Polygon Lasso Tool to break off a few pieces of the letters to enhance the effect further.  If you click on any of the images on this page, you can view the full size originals.  Save a copy of the black on whites and you can run the action on those first and compare the results.

Experiment with this one.  Try it on 3D letters, different shapes, pictures of your boss, whatever!!  Send us some of your final images and variations.

We hope you enjoy these actions.  Email Us or sign our Guest Book and let us know what you think.  Send us some of your final images.

Have Fun!!