This liquid metal text Photoshop tutorial is mostly based on Layer style settings and a combination of a lot of Curves. When combined together, they give a rich, deep and glossy / beveled look to the text.

Let’s get started, create a new canvas, we used 600*500 size and filled it with very dark blue-gray color: #2d3134. We also made a little spot in the middle, to highlight the future effect.

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Using Arial Rounded MT Bold font, type your word.

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Since we are going to create a “liquid” metal effect, we want the letter to organically stick to each other and create the illusion of liquid material filling them, so for this purpose, we seem to set the tracking for the selected characters to -40. If you are using a very big font or simply another font where characters are placed farther apart, you will need to set this setting to -100 or maybe even more. Just look and see what seems to be the best option for your font.

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

No the most important part begins, go to the layer styles palette (Layer >> Layer Styles >> Blending Options), and start applying the following values to each Option you have on the left column…

Begin with dropping the shadow. We wanted to have a relatively sharp shadow, so we set the size to 3, however, if you wish to have it more blurred, chose settings of 15pixels or bigger.

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Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

For the shadow’s quality, we made a custom Contour, please see the mapping below:

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Proceed to Inner Shadow…

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

here we used Ring – Double Contour settings for the Quality, if you don’t have these contours in your Photoshop, please see our mapping:

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Inner Glow is also important, the more opacity  you are going to add, the paler your text will end up being so we decided to set it to 57%, I could have reduced it to even less but then it would be hardly visible. All depends on the initial color you are working with.

That’s different when you work online, because you don’t need to create a book of shadows and draw all by pencil.

Ultra Glossy Liquid Metal Text Effect - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

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Use the following Photoshop Contour for Inner Glow settings: