3D Text in Photoshop

How to “fake” 3D text in Photoshop

The science behind faking a 3D Text effect in Photoshop is very simple, All you need is Duplicated text and a little bit of layer effects, Let’s get into it.

Let’s start by opening a new document. File>New

The dimensions can be anything, in this case I will be using Width: 1920px, Height: 1080px

Background colour/picture can be of your choice, I have noticed dark backgrounds work better in masking the effect,

I will be using a simple black background, to fill your canvas/page with the background color, use the shortcut Ctrl Backspace or Ctrl Delete (if you want to fill the canvas/page with the foreground color, use Alt Backspace or Alt Delete).

Once you have filled the canvas, Go to the Type tool (Shortcut: T), and type in the text,

Once you have typed in your text, we need to duplicate it by pressing Ctrl J or right click on the layer and select duplicate layer.

Now back to our original text, the color plays a very important role here, whichever text is on top needs to be a lighter color, and whichever is below needs to be a slightly darker shade of the color above it (Hide the text which is not in use to easily change color, to hide any layer, click on the small 'eye' icon in the layer palette, dont forget to turn it back on!)

Once you have the colors right, choose the original text layer, and move it slightly to the right, and then slightly down, if you are using arrow keys, hold Shift and the Right Arrow Key once, again hold Shift and the Down Arrow Key once (Holding shift and arrow keys performs double the position change rather than what you would achieve with only using the arrow keys), or whatever best adjusts you can perform with the font.

Once you have the position right, select the top text, and go into Layer>Layer Style>Inner Shadow (Alternatively you can double click on the text layer in the layer Palette to get the same option)

Once in Inner Shadow, you can experiment around with the properties to create really great effects,

And then add the default Drop Shadow settings, you can experiment around to create a better effect.

I chose the following settings:

If you are using two different texts like me, you can copy the layer styles and paste it onto the other layer, by selecting the layer which has the effects, go to Layer>layer styles>Copy Layer Style and then select the 2^nd layer from the layer palette and go back to Layer>layer styles>Paste Layer style (Alternatively you can also right click on the layer in the layer palette and achieve the same copy/paste layer style option from there)

Final Output:

Its a neat and really easy way to do 3D text, this idea came to me while doing a youtube channel art for a friend, you can check the artwork below, and dont forget to check out his Youtube Channel

In the above, i have added a background image, rest of the settings remain the same,
Hope this helped somehow, hit the comment section below for questions and feedback,
Until next time, Thanks a lot for reading!