New here? You may want to subscribe to the (free)
ABDPBT Tech RSS Feed. For an explanation of how RSS subscriptions work, please see
this explanatory post. Or, you can sign up to receive new ABDPBT Tech posts by
email (also free).
On Wednesday, I showed you how to create a letterpress text effect in Photoshop. The method I used is simple and easy, but it only works for text that is the same color as your background. What about those times when you want to create an effect of say, colored letterpressed text on a white background? Like, say, if you wanted to make a copy of my business card in Photoshop? Well, first, you’re going to want to type out the text you want to use in photoshop in the color of your choice. In this case, I’m going to use #e05555 on a white background, because it’s a lighter version of the color of the text for my business cards. Please note that this effect works best with lighter font colors and thicker fonts — I’m using Blair MdlTC, size 60pt, with the style of the font set to “smooth.”
Next, double click on the text layer in the layers palette to open the Layer Style dialog box.
Now we’re going to add an Inner Shadow by first checking the box on the menu, and then clicking the link that says Inner Shadow.
Change the values in the box as follows: Blend Mode: Multiply; Opacity: 40%, the color in box should be pure black (#000000); angle: 120; box next to “use global light” should be checked; Distance: 5px; Choke: 0%, Size: 5px (also shown in graphic below):
Clicking OK will will get you the following effect:
Here is the before and after for comparison.
Recently, I was working on a masthead and decided I wanted to have some text look like it was letterpressed into the background. I fiddled around with stuff and looked for guidance from several different sources, until finally locating the solution, which is as follows.
First, type out the text you want to use in your Photoshop document. Just use #FFFFFF for the text color for now.
Pick out two colors that are just slightly different from the background color and set them as the foreground and background colors on the Tools palette. These are going to be used in the Gradient Overlay of the next step.
Make sure the layer containing the text is selected, and go to Layer –> Layer Style to adjust the layer style properties. We’re going to add a gradient overlay to the text, so we need to choose two different colors in just slightly varying shades to our background color and the angle of the gradient needs to point straight downwards (at an angle of -90).
Now we are going to add an Inner Shadow to make it look like there is a shade on the inset part of the text. Also in the Layer Style menu, go to Inner shadow and alter the distance according to how deep you want the text to look like it is embossed. On this text, I used a distance of 3px and dropped the opacity of the Inner Shadow to 32%.
The last step is to add Drop Shadow to the text (also using the Layer Style). You will need to change the color of the drop shadow to a very light version of the background color (if you look at the little box to the right of the blending mode options in the screenshot above, you’ll see I chose a very light grey). You’ll also need to switch the blending mode to “normal” (by default it will show up on “multiply”) and lower the pixels of the size. The goal is to create just a small highlight around the letters, as is shown below.
TWEET THIS
