How to Create Glossy Plastic Text in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will learn how to make professional looking glossy plastic text in Photoshop.

Open Photoshop, and create a new document (Ctrl + N) and set the size to something fairly large. I went with 700x700, reason being is that this effect works best at bigger sizes. You can resize the image easily later on.

Select your text tool and write out your text as large as you can fit on the canvas, as for colors I am using blue (#087dd8) and for text I am using times new roman bold italic.

In the layers window, right click on your text layer and select blending options. When the layer style window pops up, find bevel and emboss and select that. Now we tweak the settings some, set the depth to around 75% and the size to 19 px. Put the soften to about 7 px, and at the bottom increase the highlight mode opacity to 100% and reduce the shadow mode opacity to 0%.

Above the bevel and emboss is the inner glow layer style, we'll be using this one next so go ahead and click it. Set the blend mode to multiply and reduce the opacity to around 40%. Then for the glow color use a darker shade of whichever color you used, the one I used for mine is #0e5286. Then increase the elements size to about 20 px or so.

Now select the inner shadow style. Set the shadow color to #0b5d9b or a darker or lighter shade of the color you're using. Put the opacity to 70 to 75% and switch the angle from 120 to 90. Increase the distance to 11 px, the choke to 13%, and the size to about 23 px.

Now go to the drop shadow layer style which is just above inner shadow, set the shadow color once again to one of the darker shades of color you are using. Increase the drop shadow opacity to 100%. Play around with the distance, spread and size settings till you find something you like. The settings I used were distance 4 px, spread 7% and size 8 px.

In your layers window, hold down ctrl and click the thumbnail next to your text layer. This should make a selection of all of your text. Create a new layer (Shift + Ctrl + N) and go to select > modify > contract, the amount depends on how big your text is, 4 px was enough for me. Select your elliptical marquee tool and while holding Alt use the tool to subtract from your selection of text.

Set your foreground color to white and then select your gradient tool, select foreground to transparent for the gradient. Then hold shift and drag down with the tool to apply the gradient, it may take some trial and error for you to find something you like. You should now have something similar to what I came up with, if you are not too happy with how it looks then play around with some of the settings in the layer styles or alter the glossy selection part.