This tutorial is available as a PDF. Click here to view or download it
Edit: Just saw pdnnoob's tutorial and St.Jim's tutorial (sorry didn't realize there were other tutorials for this). So sorry! You can lock this.
I'm going to show how to make cutout or layered text with a drop shadow.
We're going for something like this:
Required Plugins:
- Outline Object by pyrochild
Tutorial:
1) Open up a canvas that your text can fit in. For this, I chose 800x300.
2) Put in whatever you want to be the background. I used a gradient but a picture or anything else works fine.
3) Create a new layer and put your text in.
3) Hold shift and click on your text with the magic wand.
4) Go to the layer with the background (have the text area still selected) and cut (ctrl+x). It should look like this if the text layer is not visible.
5) Move the layer with the text down below the background.
6) Blur the text layer with Gaussian Blur. The bigger the radius of the blur, the more prominent the shadow will be.
7) Use pyrochild's Outline Object plugin to outline the text. You should outline it with black/dark gray. Make sure the width is enough that there are no white pixels outside of it.
😎 Flatten (ctrl+shift+f) and there you go! You can add glow or tailor it to your own needs to make it look better.
Read SAND33P's reply for some awesome ways to spiff it up.
Thanks for reading!