soooo, i surfed the internet and googled "photoshop + 90's + grunge" and came across this tutorial:
http://www.webdesign.org/vector-graphic ... 15444.html

i think its an interesting effect, that i had to try at once
i mean this is so cool: getting textures from quite ordinary photos
who would have guessed that text effect came from an ocean wave ?!
and the potential....!


so i googled an ocean wave:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q0dZki7jIp4/T ... pi.SmV.jpg
edited it with threshold and used it as a layermask on my text,


plus layerfx Stroke
looks fine so far



but then i played around some more and made this :

Nice results Espers and I like the techinque of using the photo as the layer mask.

Looks good, Esper!

Very good Esper

esper: looks cool! the colour of the text makes it looks like it's rusting and falling apart - was that the thought or just a lucky accident ?
about using ordinary photos as textures though - i thought that was done all the time?

i didnt put much thought into it
i just went with what i saw
applied the layermask and build the rest around it

im not saying this technique is new
and probably super obvious, but i didnt think of it before i saw that tutorial
i was under the impression all these grunge text effects are done with grunge brushes