Creating Text Gloss

Step 1: Creating the Workspace:

Begin with a 300 x 300 document and just for fun let make a cloud render make your colour palette a blue and dark blue I'm not supplying any colours because the cloud render is not important.

Step 2: Create the text:

Next write some text like so. I'm using:

Font Face: Arial
Size: 60px
Style: Bold

Now write some text like in the example

Step 3: Apply Some filters:

Apply the following filters so we can demonstrate this tutorial at maximum benefit.

Drop Shadow:

Gradient Overlay:

Stroke:

Our text should look like this:

Step 4: Gloss Methods:

Now apply a gloss can be done by making a selection like this:

But there is a much cleaner way of adding gloss to text without having massive shapes with lowered opacity.

On the text layer hold Ctrl on the keyboard so you select the text like this:

Now select your Rectangular Marquee tool and select this selection setting:

Now make a selection over your text like so:

After making a selection over the text you should get something like this:

Now make a new layer and right click within the selection and fill in with a Neutral white colour (#FFFFF) and should get this effect:

Now on the new layer you created when you filled in the selection lower the opacity to about 30% till you get this effect:

Step 5: Another Gloss Effect:

And there we have it a basic method of getting a gloss effect without any mess! Of course you don't have to use the rectangular marquee tool you could of used the elliptical marquee tool to get a different effect shown below:

This is similar to using the rectangular marquee tool but notice the slight curve that's going to be present:

Make a new layer like you where shown in the other example above and fill it in with a neutral white #FFFFFF:

Lower the opacity to 30% to get the end effect:

The Final Result:

You can generally play around with the effects but there's two examples of getting clean text gloss.

Download the PSD file here.