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Gold Text Effect in Photoshop

There are plenty of tutorials for creating 'gold text' floating about on the Internet. While many of them are really good, I didn't really find the final result very appealing or elegant. Here's yet another method for creating solid gold text which focuses on the interplay of colours to make your text look classy and (hopefully) realistic.

This is what the final result will look like

Step 1 - Creating a New Document

Create a new document with the dimensions and resolution specified below.

Step 2 - Creating the background effect

Gold text looks best on a dark background (ideally solid black) which sets it off. A solid black background is not always desirable however, especially while designing invitations or book-covers. In many parts of India, for example, the colour black is considered 'inauspicious'. Moreover a pure black background may not lend itself to other effects such as a 'Drop Shadow' which can be used to further enhance the look and feel of the text. We'll try to incorporate some black in the background and offset it with another dark colour .

Select the Gradient tool from the 'Tools' panel and set the following values of colours for the gradient : #000000 for the colour on the left and #680202 for the one on the right.

Keeping the 'Shift' button on the keyboard pressed, draw a straight line from the bottom of the document to the top. You should now get a background that looks similar to the image below. The 'Shift' button ensures that the line we draw is perfectly straight. This results in a smooth, straight and balanced gradient.

Step 3 - Adding text

It's time to add some text to the document. Select a nice, thick and ornate font for this effect. We intend to apply a bevel and emboss effect later so choose a font which is fairIy thick and solid. Serif fonts are preferable to Sans-Serif ones because the corners look really good when the beveI effect is applied. I chose the 'Wedding text' font which is great for invitation headers. Click anywhere in the document and type your text.

Step 5- Applying Layer Styles

Now go to Layer> Layer Style> Blending Options and apply the following styles to the text layer

Colour Overlay

In this step we will add some colour to the text. Select the 'Color Overlay' option in the blending options. The default overlay is red. Click the colour box and change the value to #FFC900.

Click the 'OK' button. The document should look similar to the image below.

Bevel and Emboss

This is the step in which we add some depth to the text. Select 'Bevel and Emboss' from the menu. Note the values for the angle and altitude.

Also, note the shape of the gloss contour for the bevel and emboss.

Click the 'OK' button. Now the document should look like the image displayed above. While what we have looks pretty good, it still lacks depth. Let's add some more depth by using the 'Drop Shadow option'

Drop Shadow

I've used high values for the 'Spread' and the 'Size' of the shadow. Feel free to reduce the values and experiment with them until you get something that appeals to you. The final result should be something like this

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END OF TUTORIAL

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Comments

Alberto Delgado

Thank you very much for this tutorial,it really helped me a lot,i could follow the steps so easy,thank you,you guys are doing a great job to help people in the site,and again thank you!!

Mukul

Thanks for the kind words! :) I plan to keep adding tutorials so keep checking.