In this tutorial, you will learn one of many ways to create a high quality 3D text effect using PhotoShop CS4.

To begin, we will start with a blank canvas and use the text tool to write some text to the document. Make it pretty big, like so:

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Next, we want to make duplicates of our text layer, but first, right-click the layer and choose Rasterize Layer. This will make the text no longer editable, so that we can manipulate it as an image. Now make sure you have the layer selected, and press Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer. Then, with the Move tool selected, press the up arrow key once and the right arrow key once, to move the new layer up 1px and to the right 1px. We need to repeat this (duplicating and moving) until we have gotten a good enough shadow, like so (I did this 6 times):

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Now select all duplicate layers except the one on top by shift-clicking, and then press Ctrl+E to merge. We should now have just 3 layers - the face of the text, the shadow of the text, and then background layer.

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Now we can apply a nice gradient and inner shadow to the face of the text. We do this by either double-clicking the layer, or right-clicking and choosing Blending Options:

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And this is what the styles look like on the layer itself:

Finally, we can also add a style to the shadow. Let's add an outer glow and a gradient overlay:

And this is our image after the styles have been applied. Feel free to add more, or try something different.

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