CREATE 3D TEXT WITH PHOTOSHOP CS6 EXTENDED
To add text to the document, we'll need to use Photoshop's Type Tool. Select it from the Tools palette, or press the letter T on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:
Step 3: Choose A Font From The Options Bar
Next, we need to choose a font. With the Type Tool selected, you'll notice that the Options Bar at the top of the screen has changed to show the options for the Type Tool. Choose whichever font you'd like to use from the list of fonts that you currently have available on your computer. This 3D effect works best with fonts that have big, thick letters. I'm going to choose Impact. You can also choose a size for your text if you like, but it's not really necessary at this point since we can easily change the size of the text later, as we'll see. For now, all we need is the font:
Step 4: Choose A Color For Your Text
Next, we need to choose a color for our text. If you look further to the right in the Options Bar, you'll see a color swatch. The color swatch shows the current text color. To change the color, simply click on the color swatch:
This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker. Choose whichever color you'd like to use for your text. I'm going to select a bright shade of red. When you're done, click OK in the top right corner of the Color Picker to exit out of it:
The color swatch in the Options Bar will change to show the color you've selected.
With our font and text color selected, click inside the document and add your text. I'm going to type "PHOTOSHOP", all in capital letters to enhance the effect. Don't worry if the text appears too large or too small for now. We can fix that in a moment:
When you're done typing, click on the checkmark in the Options Bar to accept the text and exit out of text editing mode:
If we look at our Layers palette, we can see that Photoshop has conveniently placed our text on its own layer above the Background layer. This is what will allow us to work with the text independently from the white background behind it:
Step 6: Resize The Type If Needed
If your find that your text is too small (or too large), we can easily fix that using Photoshop's Free Transform command. First, make sure your text layer is selected in the Layers palette (selected layers are highlighted in blue). Then go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Free Transform. You can also select the Free Transform command with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac):
You'll see the Free Transform box and handles appear around your text in the document. To resize the text, hold down your Shift key, then click any of the corner handles (the little squares) and drag the corner inward to make the text smaller or outward to make it larger. Holding the Shift key down as you drag constrains the aspect ratio so you don't accidentally distort the shape of the text as you're resizing it. I'm going to make my text just a little bit bigger by dragging the handle in the bottom right corner outward. You can also move the text if you need to by clicking anywhere inside of the Free Transform box and dragging the text to a new location inside the document:
When you're done, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the change and exit out of the Free Transform command.
To create our 3D effect, we need to alter the perspective of our text. There's only one problem though. Photoshop doesn't allow us to alter the perspective of text (see how that can be a problem?). To show you what I mean, make sure you still have the text layer selected, then go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and select Transform from the list. A secondary menu will appear showing all the various ways we can transform the contents of the layer we currently have selected. Notice how the Distort and Perspective options are grayed out? That means they're currently unavailable to us, and that's because Photoshop can't perform either of these two types of transformations on text.