Create A Fun, Easy Gel Text Effect With Layer Styles

Free Adobe Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials At Photoshop Essentials.com

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop text effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to use Layer Styles to easily create a gel text effect. The great thing is that you can have lots of fun playing around with the Layer Style settings to create your own custom gel text effect, or if you prefer, you can use the settings I'm using in the tutorial. When we're done creating the effect, we're going to save it as a preset style which we can then apply to other text instantly, and at the end, we'll see how to change the color of the effect, which may not be quite as straightforward as you think.

Here's the gel text effect we're going for:

Adobe Photoshop Text Effects: The final effect

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Open A New Photoshop Document

Go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose New... to bring up Photoshop's New Document dialog box and enter a width and height for your document. I'm going to use a preset size of 640x480 pixels. Click OK to create your new document:

Adobe Photoshop Text Effects: Creating a new document in Photoshop

Photoshop Tutorials: Create a new document in Photoshop.

Step 2: Choose A Color For Your Text

Select the Type tool from the Tools palette:

Adobe Photoshop Text Effects: Selecting the Type tool from Photoshop's Tools palette

Photoshop Tutorials: Choose the Type tool from the Tools palette.

You can also press T on your keyboard to quickly select it. Then, with the Type tool selected, go up to the Options Bar at the top of the screen and click on the text color swatch:

Adobe Photoshop Text Effects: Clicking on the text color swatch in the Options Bar

Photoshop Tutorials: With the Type tool selected, click on the text color swatch in the Options Bar.

This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker. Choose a color for the text. I'm going to choose a light blue for mine:

Adobe Photoshop Text Effects: Photoshop's Color Picker

Photoshop Tutorials: Choose a color for your text with Photoshop's Color Picker.

Click OK once you've chosen a color to exit out of the Color Picker.

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