How to Create Shiny Reflective Text in Photoshop

Robert here with another great video tutorial from Robert’s Productions, today I’m going to show you how to create a shiny text with a drop glow like pen of like a little glow. First thing you want to do is well, open Photoshop if you haven’t done so already then you click on file, new, make the width at 450 pixels and the height they’re about 200 and the background transparent been enough, click Okay. Then we have our workspace.

Now click on the horizontal type tool or the text tool whatever you want to call it and type your text. What is this doing, type your text that you want to make shiny and add all these effects. And now we’ve just got to change the color to black so I can see it but we’re going to be adding a gradient to this text in just a little bit. It should only look like this.

Now, we’re going to go down here to the effects. Make sure this is selected blending options. Now we want to add a gradient overlay. Click on this gradient button. Now we’re going to add a darker blue. You can add whatever colors you want, just try to do like the bottom part darker than the top part. So try to keep same colors and that looks pretty good, click Okay. Now, I’m going to add inner shadow and a drop shadow and I’m just going to click Okay. That’s all the fix that I want to add to this.

So now we’re going to create a shiny mist to this text. We’re going to get down here to create a new layer button. We’re going to rename this to reflection. Hit Enter. Now we’re going to go to the pen tool. Click here, click here see I usually do this so really fast. I’m not really explaining myself. Now I close this off, close off your pen tool. Now that you’ve done that, right click on the reflection layer and click Rasterize layer. Now hold on to Control and click this little T next to your text layer Robert. Click this little T, now go to select, modify, contract. I must contract to about two pixels. It depends on what you’re doing.

Now I’m going to hit Control-Shift-I which stands for invert I think pretty sure and then hit delete. That should delete all the white around the text. Now we’re going to hit Control-D to deselect everything. Were going to go right here in the reflection, make sure it’s highlighted and lower the opacity to about 20 and right there looks pretty good.

Now we’re going to create our little reflection down here. So what we want to do is I just totally mess it up. Control-Z, fixes anything. I hold on to Control and Select your all above layers of your text. Now right click and hit duplicate layers. Click okay and you have a reflection copy and Robert copy. Make sure these are highlighted and all of that but first I’m going to move this all up just so you can see the reflection.

Now make sure of your Robert copy and your reflection copy or your text copy and your reflection copy are highlighted only. Now go to edit, transform, flip vertical. Now it should look like that. Now use your arrow keys on your keyboard to move it down. Don’t use you mouse.

Just move it straight down until they touch so I’ll see right now they are not touching and now they’re touching. Not touching, touching. Not touching, touching, make sure they’re touching bottom to bottom like that.

Now what we we’re going to do is we’re going to only select the text layer. Now the reflection text and the copy, we’re going to down here to the mass button, click mass, add mass. Now we’re going to go over here to our gradient tool and we’re going to make sure this is set from white to black. Click okay.

Make sure down here your foreground color and your background color is set to black, so white and black foreground white, background black. Now we’re going to go about to the middle of the text, hold down shift and bring this about three quarters of the way down just like that. And now we have our nice little cool shadow. We could just change opacity bring it down a little bit about 98% just to make it look a little more realistic.

Now we can move this to about to like the middle and there you go you have a nice shiny text, cool looking text with the inner shadow, drop shadow and a nice little reflection of the ground just like this is reflecting off the glass or something. It looks pretty cool, thank your for watching this awesome video tutorial. See you next time.