Text reflection with photoshop

Another amazing effect used today in the web 2.0 is the text reflected, another classical sign of a 2.0 web graphic. Usually is used in the logos design, but not only.

I will show you how to do this effect in few simple steps with photoshop. First of all, after opened the program, create a new document 500*300 of dimension and blank background. Choose the Type toll and write your text, for this example I’ve used Georgia like font and a dimension of 48pixels, but you can do this in the way that you prefer. The image now is something like this :

Duplicate the text level, you can do this from the level menu – duplicate layer or directly from the layers windows, right click on the layer and choose duplicate. With the new duplicated layer selected go to the edit menu and choose – transform -flip vertical, and drag down the level (with the move tool ) until the down limit of the first level, like this image :

Add a layer mask to the duplicated level , clicking on the 3º button from the left, down in the layers window.

Now choose the gradient tool, and in the palette color choose black to white and trace a vertical line that start from the lower point of the duplicated level until the start of the text of the original level, look the image to understand what I want to say :

gradient tool

The results will be this

And finally low the opacity of the layer to 30% and that’s all!

The text reflection is ready. This effect is applied to the photoshop fire text tutorial, in the final part to make the reflection.
Hasta Luego!