Chrome text is super trendy right now, so why don’t we show you one of the easiest ways to create it yourself in Adobe Photoshop? This method is super convenient and allows you to keep your text boxes live, meaning even after you’ve finished all the steps it’s as easy as double clicking back into the text layer and typing whatever you want! All while never messing up the chrome look - how cool is that? If you'd like to follow along with this tutorial fill out the form below to download the working file our designer Matt is using in the video!

Step One: Basic Structure

For the first step in this process what we’re going to do is simply create a new document in Photoshop and type our text somewhere on the canvas. If you’re following along with our video tutorial above you’ll see that we’re using a 1080x1080px canvas, set to RGB and a resolution of 300. After selecting your type tool from the toolbar on the left, click in the middle of your canvas and type whatever word you want to add the chrome effect to. Make sure it’s centered, we don’t want any of this masterpiece hanging off the edges.

Step Two: Bevel and Emboss

Now that we’ve got our text on the canvas the next step is to add a Bevel and Emboss FX adjustment layer. Do this by selecting the type layer and then clicking the “FX” button at the bottom of your layers panel and choosing the “Bevel & Emboss” option at the top of the list. From here we’ll start entering in our specific settings:

• Style: Inner Bevel
• Technique: Chisel Hard
• Depth: 250%
• Direction: Up
• Size: 30px
• Soften: 0-2, this is up to you
• Angle: 90
• Gloss Contour: Ring Double
• Highlight Mode: Linear Dodge at 77%
• Shadow Mode: Multiply at 77%

After entering all of these settings your text should start looking something like this.

Step Three: Adding Contour

Depending on what color your text was originally you may notice that it seems a bit blown out, or too bright in some areas. This next step will fix that, I promise. By double clicking the Bevel and Emboss effects adjustment from the layers panel the Effects Panel should open back up. Under the Bevel and Emboss tab you’ll see a new subcategory called “Contour”, here is where we’re going to add the contour titled “Log”. If you’ve never used contours before you might only see a few preloaded - to fix this click on the “gear” icon in the top right corner and choose the “Contours” option at the bottom, a new box will appear - click “Amend”. Now you should have access to more options.

Step Four: Apply Gradient

Our fourth and final step is to make this block of letters look more like actual chrome! To do this we’re going to go back down to the “FX” button on our layers panel and add a Gradient Overlay to our text layer. For the most part the settings here will remain default, however you want to make sure that the “Style” selected is set to Reflected. Because of course, chrome is reflective in real life...duhh. The gradient of choice is completely up to you now. For our example we’re using the “Gray_03” preset within the Gray folder, just to give it a nice metallic shine. At this point in the process you can start experimenting with different colors however. Like Iridescent, Orange, maybe even pastels - each of which will only change the overall color of your text without affecting the chrome aspect.

That’s all there is to it! Like we mentioned before this effect is awesome in terms of usability as well. Let’s say you did all this work then realized you spelled the word wrong in step one...not to worry! The text layers stay completely editable and can be changed with just one click. We hope you enjoyed this bite-sized Photoshop tutorial and can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with. If you use this effect in one of your projects shoot us a DM on Instagram - we’d love to see it in action!