This tutorial is just in time for Halloween, with an eerie background and 3D text with textures. In Photoshop CS5 the Repousse abilities give you a lot of flexibility, especially with textures, so you can create some really interesting work. This is only available in CS5.
I created a new Photoshop document with the setting 1024 x 768.
I created an eerie background using black as my foreground color and a deep, bloody red as the background color. Then I went to Filter> Render>CLouds. For more contrast, I went back into Filter> Render and this time I chose Difference Clouds.
Then, I went online and found a decent gothic font, like Old London, which will go well with our vampire look. You can download it from Dafont here. Install it in Fontbook, or Extensis, whichever one that you use, and then go into Photoshop and type in the word of your choice. With the text layer still selected, go to 3D> Repousse> Text Layer. From here, the Repousse panel opens up, giving you a wealth of options. For the shape presets, I chose the one on the second row and the second from the left, which is simply called inflate. This gives you a bumpy, rounded look to your text, instead of it being flat and boring. You can adjust the angle and the strength in the Inflate section.
The Depth is way too high, so I set it to .3, which is a decent thickness. Materials is an important section, because this is where you apply your textures. For this tutorial, I am using the presets, but soon I will show you how to make your own materials. This will give you unlimited possibilities and make things look much more realistic. For the Front, I chose no texture, because I wanted the front to be a glossy white, sort of like vampire teeth. For Bevel1, I chose stone granite as the texture, and for the sides, I chose stone marble. For the bevel settings, I chose 13, and then click ok.
3D layers act like any other layer when you aren’t editing then in 3D, so we can double-click on the layer and choose Outer Glow, setting the color to an evil red. I chose hard light as the blending mode and set the opacity to around 55%. I set the spread to 12 and the size to 27. You may have to adjust these to taste depending on the size of your document, the size of the text, and the font that you chose. Here is the final result:
