Uçar, Metin

As from I launched my personal website on 18/01/10, my friends, who like to play around in Photoshop and discover its great potential, have been asking me how I created the pressed letter look for the site title. Their requests made me realise the popularity of this effect. So, I decided to write a short tutorial explaining the effect. I guess there are many fellas out there wanting to try out this effect and even implement in their projects. So, hope this tutorial will be of some help.

Step 1. Start Photoshop and create a new document according to your needs. Set the foreground colour to #cdcdcd, and use Paint Bucket Tool (Shortcode G) to fill the background.

Step 2. Type some text. For this particular example, I used the following “Pressed letter style”. See what we’ve got so far below. The color of text does not matter as it does not affect our work here.

Step 3. Now you must see two layers in the Layers Panel, background and text layers. On the top right hand side of the panel, you can see sliders for adjust Opacity and Fill values of selected layer. To reach the most commonly used effect, set Fill value to zero. OBS! The text has disappeared. Don’t panic. It’s there. We’ll make it visible again soon.

Step 4. All is set now. So double click the text layer to open Blending Options panel. In the panel, you will see many options. But don’t worry cause we’ll only work with two of them, Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow. First open Drop Shadow panel and apply the settings shown in the picture below.

Step 5. After applying these specific settings, our text starts to appear (see picture above). We’re getting there but still some work to do. Now go to Inner Shadow panel and apply the setting as in the picture below.

Step 6. And we’re done! See what we’ve achieved. Looks impressive and professional, isn’t it? This is honestly one of my favourite effects in Photoshop. Hope what we’ve done here together would be useful for you.

Do not forget to experiment: Considering the effect we’ve achieved here as a starting point, you can experiment on the followings to achieve various effects.

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Shadow
• Text colour
• Fill value of the text layer

Please let know what you think of the quality of tutorial. Through your critics, I’ll improve myself and quality of prospective tutorials.

Thanks.