Glowing Glossy Glass Text

In this tutorial, as the title suggests, we will be making some glowing glossy glass text (try saying that five times fast!).  I’m using Photoshop CS3, but this tutorial will work on any version, as far as I know.  Enough talking – let’s get to the good stuff!

Finished Product

Here’s a picture of what we’ll be making:

On the requests in some comments, you can now download the PSD file if you get stuck on the tutorial somewhere.

Step 1

Start of by making a new document big enough to hold your text – I used 1000×600 pixels – and fill the background with the color #0e151e.  Now go download the font called Space Age at dafont.com.  The link is http://www.dafont.com/space-age.font.  Get the type tool, and type your text into the center of the document.  It doesn’t matter what color the font is, because we will be making the color invisible soon.  You should have something like this:

Step 2

Now comes the good part.  The great thing about layer styles are that you can apply them to any text, and it will look the same.  Double-click on your text layer, and apply these layer styles:

General Options

Inner Shadow

Outer Glow

Inner Glow

Gradient Overlay

Gradient Settings

Stroke

You should now have something like this:

Step 3

We’re almost done!  Now all the we have to do is add some small things that make it look better.  First, let’s add a sparkle on the G.  Go to http://www.brusheezy.com/brush/282-Star-Brushes, and download the Star Brushes that are listed there.  Head over to Photoshop again, and load in the new brushes.  Grab the brush tool, select the brush with the size of 365 (see the image below), and then resize that brush to 100px.

Now make a new layer above the text layer, set the foreground color to #f4faff, and click once with the brush tool on the top left corner of the letter G to make the sparkle.  Here’s my result:

Step 4

For the final effect, we will make a shiny reflection of the text.  To do this, first duplicate your text layer, and then rasterize the new layer and all of its layer styles by first pressing Ctrl+G to put the layer into its own group, and then Ctrl+E to merge all the contents of the group (in our case only one layer) together.  Flip the newly created layer vertically by going to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical, and then take the Move tool (V), and drag the new layer (with the upside-down text) down and below the original text.  Look at this image for a reference:

To make the reflection seem to fade away, we will add a layer mask to the new text layer.  Make sure that your new text (reflected) layer is selected, and go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All to create the mask.  Take the Gradient tool, set it to a black-to-transparent gradient, and draw a gradient on the new mask like this:

Finish

And you’re done!  Here’s the final result:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and I hope that you learned something from it that you can implement in your own designs.  If you are having trouble with this tutorial, then you can download the PSD file to copy off of.

If you want more tutorials on how to create glossy designs in Photoshop, check out the Blue Glossy Button and Glossy Cutout Orb tutorials on this site.

Until next time, happy designing!