Sorry, I must not have been clear. My Algebra teacher always complained that I left out steps when doing proofs at the board. No quick mask mode. Duplicate your text, rasterize it, "rough up" the edges a little bit using the airbrush in diffuse mode, color black. Do the same thing with white in areas where you want extra light. Then hit it with Radial Blur a couple times. Be sure to move the center of the blur to the center of your text. Now erase the parts of the blur that are obscuring the parts of your text that you want to see. You can do that with the eraser, but I prefer to add a "Layer Mask" and use a soft airbrush, color black to do it. You'll probably want to add a "Levels Adjustment Layer" on top of everything and slide the white arrow on the right towards the center in order to brighten up the image when you're done. I'll try and post a step by step later today. Part of the problem is that I rarely do anything the same way twice. Right now I have to go "pretend to work". Keep trying. I just upgraded to PS 7 and am only now getting around to trying some features that were added in 5.5 - Ken -