This tutorial will show you how to make text appear as though it were placed on a reflective surface and it will work from photoshop version 7 onwards. Let us begin by placing some text on a 300px square document, like i did here. Red is a good colour to demonstrate here.
Next, duplicate the layer with Ctrl/Cmd + J and then press Ctrl + T to free-transform it. Right click and "Flip Vertical" and then move the text so it directly aligned beneath our original text, like so.
Next, go to Layer > Layer mask > Reveal all like this
and select the gradient tool. Make sure its the black/white gradient and click reverse. Then, a few millimeters or so beneath our flipped text, draw the gradient and reduce the opacity to 33%, the result will be something like this.
Now, most people choose to leave this here, but its relatively unrealistic and so let us go a bit further to make it better. On our first text layer, the one that is not flipped, press Ctrl/Cmd + J to duplicate it right click and go down to rasterize type, this converts our duplicate text to an editable raster. Next, click Ctrl/Cmd + L to open up the level's box and move the white arrow on the left all the way across as is shown here.
This makes our text black without a lot about with the marquee and paint bucket tools and is neater too. Now, Ctrl/Cmd + T to transform the text and squash it, like so. Press enter to kill the transform box. Should look like this.
Then, go to BLUR > Gaussian Blur and input a value of 3.3 like so.
Then, move the blurred black section down just a minute bit. Duplicate this, reduce the duplicated layer's opacity to 53% and press Ctrl/Cmd +E to merge the two. Then, click on the thumbnail area of the original text layer, as indicated here,
Then press delete.
And that's it, we've added some shadow to our text which makes it actually appear as though its on a surface.
Hope you enjoyed this.
