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
