Plastic Text

1. Start off by creating a new document, make it big enough to fit your text. For this tutorial make it  400pixles by 400pixles.

2. Change the foreground using the color picker to a light gray, you can change it to whatever colour later.

3 Choose The text tool and type whatever you want, for this tutorial type in plastic, you can get a number off good free fonts from www.dafont.com I have chosen the ‘bubblegum’ font from that web site.

4. First thing were going to do is give the text an inner shadow, which will give the text a depth of field. Go over to the layer styles menu and, and choose inner glow, change the colour to a dark gray and set the blend mode to normal. And hit Ok

You should have something like this.

7. Now we need to give the text a bit of highlight, create a new layer and rename it highlight.

Make sure you lock the positions of both the plastic layer and the highlight layer to do this, go to the layers pallet and choose the cross icon next to the padlock to lock the position of the layer, do this with both the layers, you should see a padlock icon on both the layers.

8. Next were going to make a selection out of the text area, to do this hold down control and click on the text layer’s preview box. You will now see the selection has been made.

9. Now we have the selection we need this selection to be a few pixels smaller than the text.  So go to select/modify and contract. And contract it by 3 pixels, however the amount of pixels you contract it by depends on the size of the text.  You will notice that it has made the selections a little bit smaller

10. Next step is to fill the selection with the colour white. So switch to white as the foreground colour using the colour picker. A quick way to fill the selection with the foreground colour is to hit alt and delete , so now the selection should be filled in white

11. Switch to the marquee tool, and move the selection up and to the left a couple of pixels using the arrow keys, once you have done this, hit delete to get rid off everything except for the lower right hand portion  of the white that we just filled in, go to select menu and choose deselect to get rid of the selection.  You should now have something like this.

13. You can add more depth to the text by adding a drop shadow, select the plastic layer in the layers pallet and go to the layer menu and choose layer style /drop shadow.

You can experiment with the settings to get the desired effect.

14. You can also change the colour of the text using the layer styles, on the layer styles window go to colour overlay and choose whatever colour you want.  

Final outcome