Today’s Photoshop CS3 tutorial is a video tutorial looking at how to make a 3D text effect. I hope you enjoy the video.

Here’s a transcript of the photoshop tutorial video.

Aaron: Hi, this is Aaron from PhotoshopDemos.com and I’m going to show you how to do a basic 3D effect for text in Photoshop. One thing that you can do here is I’m going to go ahead and create some text, and we’ll go ahead and make this a black text just so you can see it a little bit. And we’ll go ahead and just type in the word “text”.

Now I’m going to go ahead and just hit the Selection icon, go ahead and move this around, and then Control+T on my keyboard. I’m going to transform this, go ahead and make this large, go ahead and hit OK.

So then what you do is you come over here to the text layer, just double click it and that will allow you to, then, be able to edit the text. I don’t want this specific font. I’m going to try something else. I’m just going to kinda scroll through here, scroll through a couple fonts till I find the one that I want. I’m going to actually pick this one. I like this one because it’s nice and block. It has a nice solid look to it.

This might be a cool effect too if you use a pixel font. But you can do it with any font and that’s what I wanted to show you.

So you have your layer. What you’re going to do is just come over here and just double-click that there and you’ll get your Layer Styles box. We’re going to add a drop shadow. We’re going to add an inner glow. And we’re also going to take this inner glow and we’re going to turn that white, and we’re going to hit OK.

Then what we’re going to do is increase the size of that inner glow just a little bit so that it stands out on the text just like that. Then we’re going to take the drop shadow and we’re just going to move it out just a little bit like that. That’s looking pretty good.

If you want, you can do a couple other things like Double Emboss, just to kinda give it a little bit of a 3D look. That’s totally up to you. And the drop shadow, I’m going to go ahead and just kinda soften that just a little bit. I don’t want it to be too intense. That looks OK. I’m going to take of that inner shadow that I accidentally clicked on and just make sure that our inner glow…I’m going to actually go ahead and bump this to 100 just so we can kinda get a nice soft effect just like that.

And then we’re going to go ahead and hit OK. So that’s all I’m going to really do. I mean you can play with this a little bit more. You can add any effect that you want. Actually, I’m just going to go ahead and add one more thing. I’m going to go ahead and do the gradient overlay. I’m going to leave that as well as default, maybe change the opacity down just a little bit, just to get some of those edges coming through.

So then hit OK. We end up with something like this. Now, this is not the 3D effect that I’m looking for because anybody could do that. Anybody could do the next step as well, but that’s just using the default in Photoshop.

So the next thing that we’re going to do is I’m going to collapse that. I’m going to create a new layer and I’m going to go ahead and merge these two layers together. The way you do that is you can actually do Rasterize Type, or you can just combine these two layers just by selecting these two objects up here, coming over here, and then doing Merge Layers.

So I’m going to go ahead and do that. I want to just flatten everything down that I have. Then what you’re going to do is with that layer still selected, you’re going to press the ALT key on your keyboard which will actually duplicate the layer. You’ll notice the icon, your little arrow here, changes into a double little arrow. Basically, that’s going to duplicate the layer.

So then all you’re going to do now is you’re going to hit the down stroke and then left, down stroke, left, down stroke, left. And you can see what’s starting to happen. You’re starting to get a little bit of depth in the shadow and stuff.

Well, if you leave it flat you’re not going to get a whole lot of…you’re not going to see the depth as much if you’re looking at it straight on. I mean just imagine like a regular object. If you were looking at something straight on, you’re not going to see the edges of that object.

So what we’re going to actually do is we’re going to right-click on the object now that we have this flattened layer. I’m sorry, we’re going to hit Control+T and that’s going to transform the object. And then you’re going to right-click. And then you’ll see this tool, either Perspective or Warp. And you can use either one.

I’m going to go ahead and use Perspective to kind of get it started. I’m going to shrink that down. I’m going to bring this a little bit up here, and I’m going to bring this up a little bit like that. Then I’m going to hit OK. Then I’m going to do the same thing. Then I’m going to hit Control+T and right-click again. And this time I’m going to do Warp. Then I’m going to kind of work out this text a little bit. You can kinda transform it however you like. Just kinda tweak it up a little bit there. Bring this maybe up a little bit. You can bring this up a little bit as well, kinda get some interesting stretched effects here.

Just play around with this. This part of it, the more you kind of like get an angle on your text, the better your 3D text is actually going to look. So kinda stretch it around however you like it. I’m just going to kinda bend it around a little bit just to kinda make it a little bit more dramatic so you can kinda see what’s going to happen here. Gonna bring that up, then bring that just a little bit more.

You can also grab the points in the center here if you want to kinda like tweak the center of the text. Go ahead and hit OK. And so now we have this text that’s kinda bent. So now, since we have some angles, some large edges here, we’re not looking at it directly straight on. We’re going to go ahead and hit ALT and then your down arrow and your left arrow, down and left, down and left, down and left, as many times as you like. And as you start to do that, you’ll start to see that your text actually is turning. You have several layers and it’s giving you a 3D type of effect.

Once you have that, you can go ahead and merge your layers together. So I’ll select all the layers and then right-click, and now I can go Merge Layers or Merge Text. So now I have this kinda 3D looking layer. And if I change the background to a different color, like let’s make it like this kinda faded blue, you’ll notice that the top of the text, actually, it has like a rendered 3D type of effect.

And now that you have that sort of in place, you can actually select just your text layer and go up here to Image Adjustments and you can do a hue and saturation if you want to, and just do a colorized, and then change the color of your text. You can change the hue as well.

I’m just going to make this red against that blue just to make it stand out. Go ahead and hit OK. And so now you can see we have this nice 3D effect on the text.

So there you go. Play around with that effect. It’s just something really easy to do, an easy quick way to get like a 3D look in Photoshop very quickly just using the concept of perspective and duplicating layers.
Thanks for watching. This is Aaron with PhotoshopDemos.com.