Adobe Photoshop Text Effects Tutorial: Simple 3D Text

This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to create a simple 3D type effect.

Step 1: Create a New Document

First, press the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl+N" on a Win system, or "Command+N" on a Mac to quickly bring up Photoshop's New Document dialog box. You can give the document a name if you like or leave it as its default name, which is most likely "Untitled-1". Select a document size of 640x480 from the Preset drop-down box by clicking on the down-pointing arrow and selecting it from the list of available preset sizes. Of course, you're free to choose any size you like for your document. I'm using 640x480 to keep things simple.

Step 2: Select The Type Tool From Photoshop's Tools Palette

Press the letter "T" on your keyboard to quickly select the Type tool. Of course, you can always select the Type tool from the Tools palette by dragging your mouse over there and clicking on it (it's the icon about halfway down the right side of the Tools palette which looks like a letter "T"), but using the keyboard shortcut is much faster and more convenient.

Step 3: Select A Font To Use

With the Type tool selected, the context-sensitive Options Bar at the top of the screen (directly below the main Menu Bar) will display all the available options for the Type tool. On the left of the Options Bar, you'll see a drop-down box containing a list of all the available fonts you have on your computer. Click on the down-pointing arrow to display the list and select a font of your choice. For this effect, try to choose a font with big, thick letters. I'm going to choose "Impact" for mine.

Don't worry about the font size for now. We can fix that in a moment.

Step 4: Choose A Color For Your Text

Next, we need to choose a color for our text. Click inside the Foreground Color box in the Tools palette:

This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker dialog box:

See the narrow vertical bar with all the colors in it, to the immediate right of the large square area? Click inside that bar to select the main color you want to use for your text (officially referred to as the "hue"). You can click and drag your mouse up and down inside the bar to watch the colors in the large square on the left changing. Once you've found the main color you want to use, click inside the large square area to select the specific saturation and brightness value you want for your color. When you're happy with your color, click the OK button in the right corner.

I'm going to use a fully saturated red for my text.

Step 5:Type Your Text

With our font selected and a color for the text selected, go ahead and type a word. I'm going to type "PHOTOSHOP", all in capital letters to enhance the effect. Don't worry if the text appears too large or too small for now. We can fix that in a moment. Note that whenever you add new text to the document, Photoshop automatically places the text on a new layer for us, which will come in handy in a moment. You'll see your text on its own layer in the Layers palette after you've typed it.

Step 6: Resize The Type If Needed

If your find that your text is too small (or too large), we can easily fix that. First, make sure the layer with your text on it is selected in the Layers palette. It will be highlighted if it is. If for some reason it isn't selected, simply click on the layer in the Layers palette to select it. Next, with the text layer selected, press the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl+T" on a Win system, or "Command+T" on a Mac, which will surround your text in the document with the Free Transform box. This is going to allow us to quickly increase or decrease the size of the text.

We need to make sure as we're increasing or decreasing the size of the text that we don't accidentally change its proportions, so hold down the Shift key on the keyboard. Now, move your mouse over one of the corners of the Free Transform box. You'll see your mouse cursor change into direction pointers. With the Shift key still down to constrain proportions, click and drag the corner with your mouse to resize your text.

Step 7: Convert The Text To A Shape

The next thing we want to do is alter the perspective of our text to begin to create our 3D effect. There's only one problem though. Photoshop doesn't allow us to change the perspective of text. To show you what I mean, go up to the Edit Menu at the top of the screen. Click on the word "Edit" to bring up the list of options under the Edit Menu, then select "Transform" from the list (it's about halfway down). A secondary menu list will appear showing all the various ways we can transform the contents of the layer we currently have selected in the Layers palette (which should still be our type layer). According to this secondary menu, we can do things like scale, rotate, skew, and warp our text, but notice how "Distort" and "Perspective" are grayed out and unavailable? That's because Photoshop can't do these two transformations with type. Yet for this effect, we need to be able to alter our type's perspective.

The solution is to convert our type into what's called a "Shape" layer. It will still look exactly the same. The only difference will be that we won't be able to edit the type after we convert it to a shape, which is fine since we're happy with our text and have no need to edit it at this point anyway.

With the text layer still selected in the Layers palette, go up to the Layer Menu at the top of the screen, click the word "Layer" to bring up the list of available options under the Layer Menu, select the "Type" option, which will bring up a secondary list of options, and then select "Convert To Shape" from the secondary list.

If you look in the Layers palette, you'll see that the text layer now looks completely different, indicating that we've successfully converted our type into a shape, which means we can how change its perspective.

Step 8: Change The Perspective

With our text now a shape in Photoshop, the quickest way to alter its perspective is to use the Free Transform box once again, so use the same keyboard shortcut we used last time, "Ctrl+T" on a Win system or "Command+T" on a Mac, which will surround our shape with the Free Transform box.

What I'm going to do here is increase the height of the right side of my word "PHOTOSHOP", without changing the height of the left side. This will give me the perspective change I need. Now, I could go back to the Edit Menu to select the Perspective option, which will no longer be grayed out, but that's the "getting paid by the hour" way of doing it. A much faster way to change the perspective of a shape is to simply hold down the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys on a Win system, or the Command, Option and Shift keys on a Mac, and then click on either the top right or bottom right corners of the Free Transform box and drag up (if you chose the top right corner) or down (if you chose the bottom right corner). As you drag, you'll see an outline of the perspective of the shape changing into a bit of a 3D effect.

When you're happy with the look of the transformation, press the Enter or Return key to accept the transformation.

Step 9: Create Multiple Copies Of The Shape Layer, Each One Moved Slightly Further To The Right

This next step is the fun part. We're going to very quickly create multiple copies of our shape layer, each one moved one pixel further to the right from the previous one. This is where the 3D effect really starts to take shape.

Creating these multiple layers and moving each one slightly to the right is incredibly easy. First, make sure the Move tool is selected in the Tools palette. It's the tool on the top right of the Tools palette (the arrow with the smaller directional arrows on the bottom right), but don't bother dragging your mouse all the way over there to click on it. Just press the letter "V" on the keyboard to quickly select it. This trick only works with the Move tool selected. Now, with the shape layer still selected in the Layers palette and the Move tool selected, simply hold down the Alt key on the keyboard (Win) or the Option key on the keyboard (Mac) and press the right arrow key on the keyboard. Now press it again. And again. And again.

Notice what's happening? Each time you press the right arrow key with the Alt or Option key held down, you're creating a new copy of the shape layer and you're moving the new copy one pixel over to the right. The more times you press the right arrow key (with Alt or Option held down), the more copies of the layer you'll make, and the greater the 3D effect becomes.

Keep pressing the right arrow key to create copies of the shape layer until you're happy with the results. Here's mine below (I pressed the right arrow key 30 times, creating 30 copies of the layer in the Layers palette):

Step 10: Move The Original Shape Layer To The Top Of The Layer Stack In The Layers Palette

We're almost at the final couple of steps, but first, we need to move the original shape layer to the top of the layer stack in the Layers palette. Whenever you create a copy of a layer, Photoshop adds the copy directly above the original layer, which means that every copy of the original shape layer we just created is sitting above our original layer in the Layers palette. The original layer is the one directly above the Background layer at the bottom of the Layers palette. You can tell it's the original layer because it's the only one that doesn't have the word "copy" in the name.

We need to move that original layer to the very top of the pile, and there's an easy way to do it. Click on the original layer in the Layers palette to select it (it will highlight when selected). Then, on the keyboard, hold down the Ctrl key (Win) or the Command key (Mac) plus the Shift key, and then with both of these keys held down, press the right bracket key ("]"). This will instantly send the layer to the very top of the layer stack.

Step 11: Merge All The Copied Layers Together

With our original layer now at the very top of the layer stack, we need to merge all of those copies of the layer together, and this is easy to do. Simply click on the layer directly beneath the original layer in the Layers palette (in other words, the second layer from the top). Then use the scroll bar in the Layers palette if you have to in order to get to the layer directly above the Background layer (in other words, the second layer from the bottom). Don't just click on it though to select it because that will deselect the layer you've just selected at the top. Instead, hold down the Shift key on the keyboard and then click on the layer to select it, which will select that layer plus every layer in between it and the layer you selected up at the top.

With all of our copied layers now selected, use the keyboard shortcut of "Ctrl+E" (Win) or "Command+E" (Mac), which will merge all of our selected layers into one. You should now have only three layers in the Layers palette - the Background layer, the merged layer above it, and the original shape layer at the top.

Step 12: Add A Black-To-White Gradient Layer Style To The Merged Layer

And now, the final step. Click on the merged layer in the Layers palette. Now, at the bottom of the Layers palette, you'll see a row of icons. One of the icons looks like a black circle with the letter "f" inside it. This is the icon we click on to bring up a list of "Layer Styles". Go ahead and click on the icon, and the the Layer Styles menu will appear.

The Layer Style we want is "Gradient Overlay", so select it from the list. This will bring up the Layer Style control panel, which will be displaying the Gradient Overlay control options (the Layer Style control panel is context-sensitive in that it will display the controls for whichever layer style you have selected in the list of styles on the left).

The gradient we want to use is the black to white gradient. You can see which gradient is currently selected in the horizontal preview box to the right of the word "Gradient:". If the black to white gradient isn't currently selected, simply click the down-pointing arrow to the right of the gradient preview box, which will bring up a list of all the currently availably gradients, and then click on the black to white gradient box (third from the left, top row) to select it.

Once you have the black-to-white gradient selected, click the OK button in the top right corner of the Layer Style control panel, and the gradient will be applied to the merged layer, completing our 3D text effect.

The final result: