Pressed text in PhotoShop

Pressed texts are really getting trendy lately. This blog’s logo actually is pressed, if you didn’t know what “pressed” means. Ok so in case you wanted to do that effect on something you’re working on, here are some easy to follow steps to do it.

First off, you’ll need Photoshop of course. I’m using PhotoShop CS3 in this tutorial but it wouldn’t really matter if you’re using a different version(My PC’s crappy so CS6 isn’t really working that well in here). Anyway, if you don’t have PhotoShop installed in your machine, you can download one here—well umm, it’s pirated of course so let’s keep it low, lol.

Open your Photoshop and create a new file by pressing Ctrl+N or pressing on File>New in the task bar. A dialouge box should appear then. In this tutorial, we’ll be using a white canvas with a width of 600px and a height of 300px so put in these settings.

After that, a new canvas should appear. Press T or click on the text tool on the toolbar, then type some random word on the canvas.

Of course, you can type in whatever you want in there. After that, look in the lower right corner of the window, just below the Layer Palette, you’ll see a button that has the letters “fx”. Click on that. Make sure that the text layer is selected.

Once you’ve clicked on that button, a menu will appear above it; choose Blending Options.

After that, another dialog box will appear. Put these settings in it:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

That’s it. Right now, it should look like this:

Now it probably looks confusing right now but that’s all there is to it. Right now, we’ll just have to give it some nasty background to emphasize the pressed effect.

Make a new layer under that text layer by pressing the Paper button on the Layer Palette.

Now fill that with any color you want using the Paint Bucket Tool. If you can’t see it, right click on the Gradient tool in the Tool box. That should reveal the Paint Bucket. In this tutorial, I’ll be using #1b4887. Fill the whole layer(the one you just created, not the text layer).

See? The effect looks more pronounced now. Now let’s add a nice gradient on it. Right click on the Paint Bucket Tool again and choose the Gradient Tool instead. Press X to exchange the Foreground and the Background colors or just press the little curved arrow just beside the colors. Then on the Gradient bar, apply these settings:

After that, make a gradient by pulling the cursor from the upper left hand corner of the canvas all the way down to the lower right corner(make it 3/4 the way). You should now have something like this:

That’s it! You can now add some textures on it if you like!