Text shadowing
Open a New Photoshop blank document. You can go to the File menu at the top and select New. You will see a New Document dialog box on the screen where you can enter the size of the document required. You can fill in the width, height, and resolution there. In the dialog box you can also choose the Background contents which can be kept as white, so as to bring out the best result. The dialog box can now be closed after clicking OK.
After opening the new blank document, from the Tools Palette, select Type Tool.
Then go to the Options Bar at the top and choose the font style, font size that you desire. From the options bar only, you can select the colour for your text by clicking on the Colour Swatch. You can select any bright colour from the Colour Picker. Once done, the dialog box can be closed. After this, you can type inside the document, whatever is your text. Then go to the Options Bar to click the checkmark. This will accept the text.
The Layer’s palette will show the text on its layer; the background layer will be beneath it. The next step will be to make a copy of this layer, which means duplicating the new layer.
The selected layers are shown in highlighted blue colour. Once the copy is made, the original layer with the text is selected in the Layers Palette. From the Type Tool, click on colour swatch and then colour picker again. Now choose a darker tone of the original colour you selected. The reason being, this new colour will be give the shadow effect so it has to be a darker tone of the original colour. You can exit out of the colour picker now.
As the copied layer is covering the original text layer, which you have been making changes to, you need to move the original text layer a little bit, to see the changes. For this, go to the Tools palette at the top and select Move tool, which is in the first row.
This tool only activates the feature and does not actually move the text. For moving the text, the Arrow keys can be used. You can push the original text down, up, right or left; whichever way you want the shadow effect to look like.
You can create a number of shadow effects by repeating the same steps of duplicating layers.
Original Authors: Siva
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 19/05/2009
