Photoshop : Tutorial - Reflective Text

By Jennifer | Jun 8 2007 |

reflect-thumbToday’s Photoshop tutorial shows you how to give the impression of reflected text. This is a very popular effect around the web at the moment and it’s easy to achieve using a couple of transformations and the gradient tool.

1. Create a new Photoshop document size 500 x 300 pixels with a white background.

2. Select the Type tool from the toolbar. reflect

I’m using a sans-serif font called Berlin Sans FB Demi which can be found on dafont.com and a dark red colour (RGB #990000), font size 80 pts.

3. Press Ctrl + J (windows) or Cmd + J (mac) to duplicate the text layer.

4. Right-click on the text layer in the Layers panel and choose Rasterize Type from the drop-down menu.

5. Choose Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical.

6. Select the Move Tool reflect1 in the toolbar and use the down arrow keys move the upside down text downwards.

Hold down the Shift key while you hit the down arrow to jump 10 pixels at a time. Move the upside-down text to the point where there is just a small gap between each piece of text.

reflect2


 

7.Choose Edit > Transform > Perspective. A set of handles will appear around the upside-down text. Select the bottom left corner and drag it out a little bit to the left. Press Enter (windows) or Return (mac) to complete the transformation.

8. On the upside-down text layer, Ctrl + Click (windows) or Cmd + Click (mac) on the preview thumbnail. This will select all of the upside-down text.

9. Choose Select > Modify > Expand and expand the selection by 1 pixel.

10. Press Delete to get rid of the upside down text but leave the empty area selected.

11. Select the Gradient tool reflect3.

reflect4


In the Tool Options bar choose Foreground to Background (your background colour should be white before you do this).

 

12. Drag a straight line from the top of the selection to near the bottom of the selection.

reflect5

13. Press Crtl + D (windows) or Cmd + D (mac) to deselect the selection.

reflect6

14. Reduce down the Opacity of the upside down text to about 20% (make it a higher percentage if you want to see more of the “reflection”.

reflect7

15. Click on the Layer Styles button at the bottom of the layers palette and choose Inner Glow. Set the Glow colour to white, Mode to Screen and Opacity to about 40%.

You should now have a nice piece of reflected text something like this:

reflect8


In this tutorial I’ve made a reflection with text, but the idea is basically the same for any object that you want to reflect.

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials 

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Comments

7 Responses to “Photoshop : Tutorial - Reflective Text”

  1. Hummie on June 8th, 2007 1:28 pm

    I have been to your blog before. Great work providing resources for Photoshop users! Thanks!

  2. admin on June 11th, 2007 12:41 pm

    Thanks Hummie, for visiting and for your kind words! You’ve got tons of cool Elements stuff on your site too. It’s really building into a great resource.
    Jennifer

  3. Sherif on January 27th, 2008 3:58 pm

    Hi Jennifer, this is really cool and simple, i like all of your tutorials as well as the books recommended by you right here.

    Do you recommend to subscribe for good digital arts and illustrations magazine ? do you know any good and professional ones providing update information and ideas ? i heard about one called Computer artwork or something, do you suggest any online forums and communities as well?

    By the way, i tried emailing you through the website form, but it seems you didn’t receive it since i didn’t hear back from you, i was just offering few of my own simple photoshop tutorials to include right here in the tutorials page.

    keep the good work :) wish to hear back from you soon.

  4. Jennifer on January 27th, 2008 5:32 pm

    Hi Sherif

    I sometimes buy Computer Arts magazine and some of the photoshop magazines - not every month though, because I think they are quite expensive, in Ireland they are anyway. Some of these magazines have forums and free tutorials - http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/
    http://www.computerarts.co.uk/

    Can you send me an email again. Your message might have been eaten by my spam filter.

  5. Sherif on January 27th, 2008 9:42 pm

    Hi Jennifer, Thanks alot for the links, they are really useful, i remembered now the magazine name, it’s computer arts, and i agree that it’s so expensive to subscribe for.

    I will re-send the email again :), i hope you can add it to safe list to be able to see it :)

    Thanks again for your concern.

  6. Sherif on January 27th, 2008 10:05 pm

    Hi again, i sent the email using the submission form in your site, does it filter the messages as well ?

    I hope if you didn’t receive my email that you can send me an email to the address i include in my comments, so that i can write to you directly without using the submission form, if you don’t mind that :)

  7. Sherif on January 29th, 2008 8:13 am

    Hi Jennifer, i got your email and i replied back twice, just wanted to assure whether you received my email or not,

    wish to hear back from you soon.

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