3D text can be made simply in Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks and there’s so many different ways of creating it, no two text graphics will ever look the same! It’s great for making text on your website stand out and it can even be used in your logos and avatars.

Our 3D examples above took only minutes to make and demonstrate different ways to turn your text 3 dimensional! Read on to find out how to try these different methods; drop shadow, inner bevel, inset emboss, and blend.

Our examples below were made in Adove Fireworks CS3 but will work similarily in CS4 and versions of Adobe Photoshop.

Creating Text

The following three steps will be used to make our text before turning it 3D.

1. In your chosen graphics package (Fireworks/Photoshop - we’re using Fireworks), click File > New and make a canvas of 350px x 200px.

2. Click the Text Tool button and click on your new canvas area. Type the text you want to make 3D - we’re going to use our company name ‘ITMDesign’.

3. Your text may not have been in the place you wanted when you typed, so let’s select the pointer tool and drag the text to an area of the canvas we are happy with. If you can’t see your text, it’s because it’s the same colour as the canvas. Either way, at this point we want to change the text colour, so open the properties inspector by clicking Window > Properties and the properties inspector will appear toward the bottom of the screen (as shown above). Here we can change the colour, font, font size, alignment and many other properties for the text. We’ll leave you to experiment with each property as it’s self explanatory. For our text we’re going to use the following:

Font: Arial
Font-size: 68px
Font-Colour: #9966CC (purple)
Alignment: Center

Our text is now aligned, sized and coloured how we want it, so let’s begin the different 3D text effects!

Drop Shadow’s make your text appear as if they are floating just above a surface. Method 1 is a really quick way of making custom drop shadows by placing a darker (shadow) version behind the actual text.

1. Select your text on the canvas and press on the keyboard CTRL + ALT + D. This will create the text again, but in a second layer placed behind the first layer. Open the Layers inspector by clicking Window > Layers (or pressing F2 on the keyboard). Click the second layer in the Layers inspector to choose the text that we duplicated.

2. In the property inspector change the font colour to black and on the keyboard press the down cursor key twice and then the left cursor key twice. This will move our shadow layer so the edges of it appear just outside of our top layer.

And there we have it! Simple!

For further experimentation, try moving the shadow layer further from the top layer. The further away the shadow layer the farther from the surface the top layer of text appears. You can also alter the opacity of the shadow text which works especially well if the shadow is floating over the top of something else (such as an image).

Method 2 uses Fireworks inbuilt effects engine to create the shadow we want.

1. Open the properties inspector by clicking Window > Properties. Select the text on the canvas that you want to apply a drop shadow to and click the + symbol next to Filters in the properties inspector. Choose Photoshop Live Effects and then click the Drop Shadow checkbox.

2. If the Photoshop Live Effects appear over your text, simply drag the window down and you should see your text already with a default drop shadow applied. In this window we can choose different options to make our drop shadow unique. To make choosing each of the options easier, imagine a light being shone over your text; opacity controls the strength of the light, distance controls how far the light is from the text, angle is the angle at which the light is being held over the text, size is the size of the shadow, and spread is how thick the shadow is. We can also apply ‘noise’ to make the shadow appear broken.

Experiment with the different options and you will realise just how many different 3D shadow effects are possible using the Photoshop Live Effect editor (available in both Photoshop and later versions of Fireworks).

Inner Bevel makes your text appear as if from the sides it’s rising toward the middle. It makes your text appear chunky, like it’s standing out from the screen.

1. Open the properties inspector by clicking Window > Properties. Select the text on the canvas that you want to apply an inner bevel to and click the + symbol next to Filters in the properties inspector. Hover over Bevel and Emboss and then click Inner Bevel.

2. Already your text has a default Inner Bevel effect applied to it but we can further change these options to get the effect looking how we want. Choosing ‘Flat’ will make the sides of the text appear sloped to a point, whereas choosing ‘Smooth’ will make the text appear to smoothly reach a top point. Simply experiment with these options to get the effect you want!

Inset Emboss is the opposite of Inner Bevel. It makes your text appear as if it is inset into the page with a surrounding edge that slopes upwards to meet the rest of the page.

1. Open the properties inspector by clicking Window > Properties. Select the text on the canvas that you want to apply an inset emboss to and click the + symbol next to Filters in the properties inspector. Hover over Bevel and Emboss and then click Inset Emboss.

2. Already your text has a default Inset Emboss effect applied to it but we can further change these options to get the effect looking how we want. Increasing the width will make your text appear to sit deeper in the page and contrast alters the definition of the shadow.

Blend is our favourite 3D text effect! It’ll work in later versions of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks CS3 and CS4.

The Blend effect will take two seperate paths and blend from one to the other.

1. Right click your text on the canvas and click ‘Convert to Paths’ (Blend only works with paths). Duplicate this layer by pressing CTRL + Shift + D on your keyboard. Open the layers inspector by clicking Windows > Layers or pressing F2 on the keyboard. Click the second layer to select your duplicated text. Now hold shift on the keyboard and press the up cursor key once and then the right cursor key once (still whilst holding shift).

2. We want our 3D text to be black at the bottom and fade into purple at the top. So let’s select the bottom layer in the Layers inspector and change the fill colour to black in the properties inspector.

3. Open the Paths panel by clicking Window > Others > Path. Now select both of the text layers and press CTRL + Shift + G on the keyboard. This will ungroup each layer, making each letter a seperate path of it’s own. If you’ve done this correctly, you will notice many more objects in your Layers inspector.

4. We can now start applying the Blend effect to each letter. To do this, we need to select both letters of the layer. So in our example, we are going to select both layers of the letter ‘I’ and only those two layers. When selected, click the ‘Blend Paths’ button in the Paths Panel. Next we are asked for the number of steps to take to blend the two layers. Imagine this as the number of copies of the letter ‘I’ that will be used to fill the gap between the two layers. We’ve chosen 50 for our example above. Click OK and then Yes when asked ‘Flatten blended portions?’.

5. We can then follow step 4 until all of the letters have been blended together. Please note: when using the blend feature, you may find your computer slows down a little and the operation isn’t instant. Don’t worry about this, the feature takes a little while as there’s a lot for the program to work out. The more steps you want between the layers, the longer it will take to process.

So there we have it! Many different ways to make your 3D text. There’s many more different ways of making 3D text but just the above 5 mentioned ways are so versatile that you’ll always be able to make different looking text each time.

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