I was inspired by this awesome Gold Effect Photoshop collection from PSDDude and tried to create my own gold effect using Photoshop.

What we will be creating

To create this realistic gold effect in Photoshop I will make a Photoshop layer style and apply it to a simple text.

Create The Gold Text

Start by creating a new document in Photoshop with a size of 800px by 600px. Fill the background layer with a purple violet color (I used #9b008e).

Let’s write the word “GOLD” in the center of the document using the color white. You can use whatever font you want, but I’ve used Raleway font that you can download for free. You should get something like this:

Gold Gradient

To start creating our gold effect Photoshop layer style we will start with a gold gradient.

Double click on the text layer to open up the layer style window and check the Gradient Overlay checkbox. This will add a gradient to our text. We will use the default settings (linear gradient, 90deg, etc.) and only change the gradient settings to make a gold gradient.

Click on the gradient color bar in the Gradient Overlay settings screen and make a gradient similar to this:

The gold gradient is made up of 6 color stops, and the gold colors hex codes I’ve used from left to right are:

#FFFFD6

#FFD700

#FFFFD6

#FFD700

#FFE86A

#BEA000

And here’s the gold text effect so far with the gold gradient applied:

This already looks pretty good as a gold text effect, but let’s add some finishing touches to make it look even better.

Gold Metal Letters

Let’s modify our gold Photoshop style and make the letters look like gold metal letters.

First, let’s turn on Stroke. I used a size of 3px, position Inside, blend mode Normal, opacity 100% and as the fill type a color with the hex code #d7c002.

And here’s how the gold metal letters will look like:

Adding Shadow To The Gold Letters

To call our gold text effect complete we will add a shadow to make give the design a bit more depth.

Here are the shadow settings:

Gold Effect Final Result

There are a lot of pre-made gold styles for Photoshop available on the web.

I already mentioned the best and most complete list of gold effect Photoshop styles from PSDDude, and I also encourage you to check out this free gold effect Photoshop layer style pack from PhotoshopSupply.

Quick Tip: What if you don’t want to use Photoshop?

If you don’t want to use Photoshop to make a gold text effect, you should check out MockoFun, an awesome tool with which you can create gold text online.