Posted on January 16, 2009 - by Khaled

Easily achieve the trendy LetterPress effect with Photoshop

In late 2008 and early 2009 LetterPress effect is becoming increasingly popular and used in many web sites. So here 2 quick examples on how you can create a realistic letterpress effect with Adobe Photoshop (Version 7 or newer). This will take you just a couple of minutes and you can achieve it even if you are a beginner.

Example 1:

Open Photoshop, create a new document (600 x 400 for instance). I started with a white background and typed the word Letterpress (Font: Century Gothic, 60pt, All caps and set the color for instance to: #00bae8).

Now we are going to add layer effects (double click the text layer) and simply check the inner Shadow box and set it to these values (shadow color: black #000000):

You will obtain this kind of effect:

As you see we’re almost there! You can customize a bit more with overlaying a gradient overlay or you can rasterize the type layer and work on it with burn/dodge tool. You can check out this tutorial to see how to use Dodge/Burn tools. You should be able to end up with a final aspect that looks like this:

I just applied a gradient overlay effect and some burning at the base of the letters.

Example 2:

Ok, let’s see another variation that might work better if you are after a metallic Letterpress effect. Create a new document, fill in the background with a light grey color (#d0d0d0 for instance). Type in LETTERPRESS (Font: Century Gothic, 60pt, All caps, Set tracking to 50 and set the color for instance to: #919191). Now we’re going to add an inner glow effect this time. Set the Inner glow values as following (color: #000000):

The noise percentage can be tweaked and set to what is best for your purpose!

Now apply an outer glow with these settings:

You should obtain something like this:

All you need now is to play with your background to make it look like brushed metal using noise filters and motion blur along with dodge/burn tools. May  be also add a gradient overlay to the text layer and you will have something that looks like this:

If you think I should put more details about the creation of this metallic background or on the last steps of this tutorials let me know!