One text effect that you can use in Photoshop is to create text that looks like metal or brushed metal. So go ahead and start a new document to do that. So go to file new and go ahead and just set the background. This is just the background for the text. So whatever size you want, I’m going to do 450 x 450. And then for background, I’m going to go ahead and—you could select white or you can select a background color. I’m going to go ahead and stick with white. Click okay.
We want to add some text here. So go ahead and use your text tool and then you want to make sure that you have pretty large text so you can see the effects of the metal. So go ahead and choose 72 or you can make it even larger if you want. And then you also want to choose a font that’s going to have some good space in it where you can see the metal actually turn out within the letters. So I’m going to go ahead and choose Gill Sans Ultra Bold and then we want to change the color to a metal color. So go ahead and go with a dark gray. Click okay.
Click in your document and then type your text. So right now, I’ve just created a text, now we’re going to actually change it where it is. It looks like metal. So go ahead and make sure that you have your layer selected that has your text on it, right click and go to blending options and click on bevel and emboss. We want to set it where we have an inner bevel and on the smooth setting do a 100% depth and let’s go ahead and do the size at five pixels and then zero as your soften. Now for the angle, go ahead and use 90 degrees and let’s turn off the global light and then do 75 for the altitude. For the gloss contour, go ahead and choose the preset of this rolling hill that’s half-round and go ahead and check this box just to make it a little smoother. And in the highlight mode, go ahead and choose normal and also the shadow mode choose normal. We’re going to change the highlight opacity to a 100% and the opacity for the shadow mode to 50 just to lighten it up a little bit, so this is it for your bevel and emboss settings.
Then go to contour and of course you can make this similar but a little bit often numbers to create kind of a custom look for yourself. We’re going to make this anti-aliased and the contour, let’s go ahead and stick with the default and then the range, go ahead and set to—let’s choose 77%. Actually, let’s go 80% to make that a little bigger. And then we’re going to actually add a satin to it. So go ahead and click on satin and we are going to choose the normal blend mode here and go ahead and choose white for the color and the opacity 100%, angle 100%, distance. We’re going to go and take down to two, and then the size, we’re going to take to 10 so it pretty much matches on what we’re doing. And then for contour, we got to go ahead select the ring. Actually, let’s go ahead and do the half contour on this one.
One more step here, we have the gradient overlay we want to have now. We’re going to do normal blend mode and a 100% keep with the linear here. The style we’re going to change to reflected and then the angle, keep it 90%, the scale 100%, don’t reverse it here.
So let’s go ahead and click okay and let’s see how it looks. So we have a real light color right here. Let’s go ahead and change this color to make it darker. And you could see this is having a light effect because of our overlay, click on okay. And let’s go back here and let’s fix this, right click and go on blending options. This is the great thing about this is you can go in and if it doesn’t quite turn out how you want it to, then you could go ahead and you can change it.
Let’s take off our satin overlay and see what we get here. Take off our gradient overlay, click okay. And we get much more of a metal look. You of course could go in. You could try it with a different combination showing to see how it’s going to show up. You really do want your bevel and emboss and I like having just that. But if you’d like to go in and you’d like o make your satin different, then you could choose a color closer to gray, click okay.
And now, you have a much more realistic metal text look.
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