Quite possibly one of the most overly used Photoshop and image effects in the graphic design industry. The Gloss effect is a necessary one to know and what better topic to cover for my first Photoshop tutorial.

Our first step is to setup our canvas by giving it a gradient background and adding our text using the type tool. I would recommend a thicker typeface when using the gloss effect as the end result will look better. For this tutorial, we have used the Impact font.

Once you have created your text, right click the text layer in the layer window and select ‘blending options’ and apply the following effects:

Your result should look like this:

Next up, create another new layer above the text layer; this will become our gloss layer. With the new blank layer selected, hold down ‘ctrl‘ and click on the text layer. Be sure to click the actual icon with the ‘T‘ on it. Now contract the selected area by 1 or 2 pixels by going to ‘Select‘ > ‘Modify‘ > ‘Contract‘. The result should look something like:

Next, select the ‘Elliptical Marquee Tool‘ and while holding ‘Shift‘ + ‘Alt‘, click and drag from the top-left of the text to the middle-right of the text and release the mouse button when you have positioned it the way you want. You should be looking at something similar to this:

Once that is complete and with the gloss layer still selected, click on the gradient tool. Be sure it is set to ‘linear‘, with a Foreground to Transparent preset and the color set to white.

Click and drag from the bottom of the selected area of the text, to the top of the selected area. Do this a couple times until it looks the way you want. Now right click on the gloss layer, ‘Blending Options‘, and set the opacity to about 40%.

That is the final step. You should now have some nice glossy text.

You can also download the PSD for this tutorial.