Peweedesign

I was reading this tutorial on using only layer styles to manipulate text in Photoshop. It was a great read and some of the examples were really cool. After seeing the response off so many people I thought that I would share some as well. The first in this series is a Florida chrome style. I hope you enjoy it and that you might be able use it in one of your designs.

To get me started I borrowed a texture from nortago @ deviantART, got myself a nice grungy font over at dafont.com.

Since this is not for print I’m making a 520×300px document, I add the background and layout my font the way I want it.

Let’s start with the Drop Shadow, I picked #000000, kept the Blend Mode to Multiply, for the Angle i picked 90°, Distance is 5px and no Size

Then we move on to the an Inner Glow, I set the Blend Mode to Overlay, changed the Color to something a bit more blue in my case I choose #00ccff. We want the Technique to be Precise and the Size 3px. Change the Contour to Gaussian and push the Range up to 60%

Then I created a 90° Linear Gradient Overlay with 4 colours. Starting from the left and going to right.
Color: #fffffff > #cccccc > #3b3f45 > #a7aeb8
Location: 0% > 50% > 65% > 95%
Midpoint: 50% > 50% > 25%

And finally we Stroke our text I choose 1px in Size, my Position was Inside, Blend Mode set to Color Dodge, we want to Fill our Stroke with a 90° Linear Gradient, containing 3 colours. Starting from the left and going to right.
Color: #616161 > #ffffff > #616161
Location: 0% > 75% > 100%
Midpoint: 50% > 50%

Then I decided to add another line of text and in a different font but the great thing since we have done the job once we can right click the text layer with our mouse and Copy Layer Style, right click the second Layer and Paste Layer Style. Your final result should look something like this:

And for those of you who want to play with it, here is a PSD zipped up