Gold is the sweat of the sun !

In this tutorial im going to show you how to make two different gold texteffects.

My canvas is 800x460px and the font is Jersey54 at a size of 233px.

I lifted the colour from one of the Gold gradients i made for 2ton, which again was sampled from a picture of a gold bullion i found with google image search:

#d3af40

I highlighted the letter A and increased the size to 338px.

Next i autocropped the layer and aligned everything with the Align Tool and adjusted layer to imagesize.

As you can see, this font gives us slightly jagged edges on the letter A.

I fix that by blurring the text by 3px and then sharpening with an alpha curve.

Firing up layerfx, i applied an Inner Bevel with a Size and Depth of 9.

For the highlight and shadow colours, i used the original letter colour and played with the slider to lighten/darken, until i was happy.

As you can see, we still have jagged edges on the A and R, so i increased the Soften to 3.

Now for the alpha-magic.

One thing you can do is the good old 'Ring Contour', like this:

If you drag the right anchor down to the bottom, it will be completely unfilled.

But as you can see, there is another problem with it, the highlight's edges overlap the text.

I use to fix that by alpha selecting the text before i apply the curve.

Like this:

For the shadow i used a similar Ring Contour, but i let the right anchor where it is and tweaked the contour a bit more.

If this was to be my final result, i would do a New From Visible without the background and then apply Anisotropic Smoothing with these values:

This gives us a rather abstract looking gold text:

But i want to show you all another variation.

For this i use a different font (Creampuff) that is mostly rounded. 

I apply the same Bevel values, but this time with the Surface Contour: 

'Rounded Steps '

and a 'Soften' of 1.

Again im applying the curve with the alpha selected text, to prevent the contoured bevel from bleeding over the edges.

This time with the 'Double Ring' curve.

This gives us these nice highlight on the curvature of the text.

On the shadow i also use the 'Double Ring' but with two minor tweaks.

I drag the right anchor down to the bottom, to make the bevel unfilled, so there is no colour inside the ring-shaped shadow.

The opposite on the left anchor: i drag it up a bit, which gives the text inside a bit of shading.

It also spreads the colour to the whole layer, so in case you have a white background you need to get rid of that with a layermask.

This combination makes the text look very shiny !

For a texture effect, i alpha selected the text and shrank by 12.
That way its a bit smaller than the bevel.

Then filled with a slightly lighter colour (Lightness +50) on a new transparent layer and blurred by 3px.

Finally 'HSV Noise', with the following values:

and reduced the Opacity to 30%.

For a shading effect on the edges lets add a Satin layer.

I used these values:

This gives us an irregular darkening, a bit like a bevel:

I also added a texture, by rendering Solid Noise at x/y: 9.

Added a layermask, so only the text is covered and set the Mode to 'Soft Light' at 61,5%

Which gives us the final result: