3D Photoshop text Tutorial

Intro:

Make a sweet perspective 3D text in this Adobe Photoshop tutorial.

Step 1:

Type your text with a black foreground so the text will be black. I used Impact for the font, You could use a whole lot nicer custom font if you want, but for tutorial purpose I allways use a font everyone has on a Windows system. I advise you use a thick font for this effect, cause it has some brushing and shadows on the inside which will look odd on a thin font.

Step 2:

If your happy with the look of your font and font size we have to rasterize the layer so we can apply a perspective on the text, this will really pop out the 3d look we're going for. So go to your layers palette and right-click the text layer which should be the name of the text you've typed in. Then choose Rasterize Type. Go to Edit > Transform > Perspective, and slide the top left or top right square a bit to the inside so you'll have something like my preview below. Note: Don't slide it to far or it will look all weird.

Step 3:

Now we have to make the 3d effect which which we're going to use a handy photoshop function for. When you have a layer selected and HOLD the ALT key you can duplicate that selected layer by using one of the arrow keys. What this does it duplicates and at the same time it moves the duplicated layer 1px to the direction your going with the arrow key. So for example you hold alt and press the down arrow key once, that will leave you with 1 duplicated layer 1px down from the original layer. Hope this is clear now so we can make the 3D photoshop effect.
Make sure your text layer is selected, AND your move tool (the function will not work with any other tool). Then HOLD ALT and press the UP arrow key 6 times. This will leave you with 6 duplicated layers. You can't see the 3D effect quite yet, we're going to fix that in the next step.

Step 4:

Now let's add the blending options to the top layer. Right-click your TOP text layer (the 6th duplicated layer which should be your top layer in the layers palette), now choose Blending options and enter these blending options.



This next screenshot is of the gradient structure for the Gradient Overlay blending option.



And this is my progress so far



One little thing we have to do before we go to the next step is adding the following blending options to the bottom text layer (so the original layer we started with).



Which gives you a nice shadow and subtle outer glow like below.