How to Create a 3D Text Effect in Photoshop and Illustrator

 

INTRODUCTION 

welcome back to design Smith if this video has actually reached you that means that I was actually able to finish it I was sick all weekend and I'm still feeling a little bit of the effects of it so I'm not exactly feeling 100% right now so hopefully I can get through this video and then afterwards I'm going to go lay down today I'm going to be showing you how to do this really cool 3D typography effect in Photoshop before we get started please consider subscribing to support the Channel all right

ILLUSTRATOR

 so the first thing we need to do is start in illustrator all right so I'm here in illustrator and for your reference I'm using a document that is 18 in wide and 24 in tall okay so I've got my text typed out right here unfortunately I have no idea what font that was because I created this design several years ago so I'm just going to cycle through and see if I can find that same font or just find something similar it definitely works best if you can find a really nice thick font and also because of the 3D look you want it to look maybe a little bit retro you want to look for something that's a little bit on the blocky side but it's also nice and unique to capture that retro feel all right

GIGAL LIPSE 

so I think this one is really cool this is called gigal lipse and the first thing that caught my eye on this is that it looks like an old television set from like the 1950s or something so very cool this is what we'll be going with all right so what we're going to do here is I'm going to select everything and let's go over here to character and the first thing we want to do is set it to Optical karing that gives us a really good starting point for kerning this type if there's anything that we want to go in and make some adjustments on we can do that if you want to get even better with kerning check out this video right up her.

CURING EXACTLY

 okay I've got the curing exactly as I want now what we're going to do is manipulate this text a little bit more what I want is for each line of the type to be exactly the same width so what I'm going to do is Select everything here I'm going to go over here to type and create outlines and now with everything still selected I'm going to ungroup everything so I'm going to hit shift command and G or shift Control G if you're on Windows and now I can select each one of these lines individually so I'm going to select this top one and group it select this one and group it and this one and group it

ALIGN PANEL

 so I think that it's a good practice to get in the habit of doing but I'm going to select all three of these select the top one and go over here to the Align panel if it's not up here for you make sure you go to window and align and then it'll show up over here and we're just going to align everything to the horizontal center now we're going to select the top line and go over here to transform and I'm going to do something like 12 in this number doesn't actually matter all that matters is that they're all the same width so select this one and we'll enter 12 in and same thing with the last one all right

PATHFINDER

 so now they're all exactly the same width so now we're going to select all three of these I'm going to select the top one and we're going to go over here to the distribute spacing in the Align panel if you don't see it then go over here and make sure that show options is selected and I'll try something like a/4 of an inch and I think the spacing on that is good now I'm going to select all of this and go over to the Pathfinder and click on unite this is going to make everything one continuous shape this is another way of grouping things together so you can select this and pick it up and now it's all one unit all right

OBJECT TRANSFORM

 so the last thing we're going to do in illustrator is go up here to object transform and shear and we want to Shear this vertically and I'm going to do -20° and this next step really is optional I just like to do it because it's a habit but I just go over here to Pathfinder and click on unite that will make sure that all of the effects that are applied to the text are removed while still maintaining the appearance okay so now we're going to copy this and I've got a new document open in Photoshop

SMART OBJECT

 so we're going to hit paste and we're going to change this to Smart object and hit okay and I'm going to bring it to about right here I'm not really too concerned with the exact sizing of this all that really matters is that it's nice and large in the center of the poster all right so I'm going to name this layer as 3D text bottom and I'm going to double click on the thumbnail here and this is going to take us right back into illustrator and I need to change this color from black to red and hit okay and now we can just hit save and now that updates and now I need to make a copy of this layer by hitting command J on my keyboard going to double click on this text and change bottom to top and we can just get rid of copy there and we need to hide this top layer temporarily and now

GLOBAL LIGHT 

 I'm going to go over here to the bottom layer and double click on it and we're going to click on bevel and emboss so this is actually going to be a preset that I went ahead and saved before I started this video but we'll go through this so for the style we've got inner bevel technique we've got chisel hard depth is 100% direction is down size is 25 but I'm actually going to increase that to about 50 and soften we're going to leave it zero and for shading 90° use Global light 30° altitude gloss Contour linear

FX ICON

 I'm going to check anti-alias and we're going to leave highlight mode at normal with an opacity of 50% and Shadow mode normal and opacity at 50% and just hit okay and now we're going to go over here to the layers panel hold down option on Mac or alt on Windows right above that FX icon right there and we're going to click and drag up to that top layer so now these both have the exact same bevelin and boss effects and we can collapse both of these arrows right here 

3D TEXT EFFECT

we don't need those anymore and now we're going to make sure the top one is selected and go over here to our blending mode and change it to difference and as you can see we've already got a little bit of that effect happening there and now with the top layer selected let's hold down shift on our keyboards I'm going 20 pixels to the left so that's two strokes on the keyboard while holding down shift and that will go up 20 pixels so now we've got this really cool 3D text effect going on and now it's time to apply some effects to the top of this this is a photocopy texture and and I'll link to this down in the description below 

COOL TEXTURE

so now we're just going to pick this up and bring it over here to our file and just drop it right there now we're going to Center this and we will scale this up and I'm going to hold down shift so that we can go to the exact proportions there and we need to change this blending mode to difference and now we can hit command or control I on our keyboards to invert those colors and now we've got a really cool texture being applied to the actual text itself now there's one more texture that we're going to add here and it's going to be a half te pattern 

CREATE A NEW LAYER

so let's create a new layer and I'm going to name it half T te and I'm going to fill it with 50% gray hit okay and we're going to go up here to filter and filter gallery and right here under sketch we're going to select half tone pattern and for the pattern I'm going to bring it down to about a two and we're going to leave the contrast at 50 and we're going to do the pattern type as Dot and hit okay and now we're going to change the blending mode of that half T te pattern to Overlay and it's a little bit strong so let's Dr drop it down to about 50% and now we've got that really cool half T te pattern that's showing up in all of these different areas especially the color areas and I'll show you this last part it's optional but I think that it adds a lot more depth to it

COOL CONCENTRIC CIRCLES

 so we're going to add a circle half te and just like before we're going to hit shift and delete and fill it with 50% gray hit okay go up here to filter filter gallery and we're still on half T te pattern and now we're going to change this to Circle and that's going to give us these really cool concentric circles going from the center and out outward and we're going to hit okay and do the same thing as before change the blending mode to Overlay and now I think I'll drop this down to about a 25% so here you go here is your 3D text with your really cool pattern overlays and there's one last thing you can do with this if you ever want to change the colors there's a couple of ways to do this but one thing you can do is double click on the thumbnail and you can change the colors directly in here and then make sure you hit save and hit yes if that comes up

COMPLIMENTARY COLORS

 go back in here to photoshop and then those colors will adjust however if you want to do it directly inside of Photoshop this is a cool way to do it if you go up here to create an adjustment layer we're going to click on Hue and saturation and with red and blue already being really nice complimentary colors if you adjust the Hue right here it will keep that relationship there so you can change it to like this green and purple right here you can go even more 50s Retro by doing this teal and pink color and you can also go to the opposite direction where you can do like a blue and yellow or like a orange and blue 

CONCLUSION

so you've got plenty of options there and also if you want to make the colors a little bit more vibrant you can just crank up the saturation a little bit that plus 30 looks really cool all right well here's the full size and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial today in Photoshop if you did please leave a like on the video and consider subscribing to support the channel I'll see you next time bye-bye

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