Ever wanted to make your text look like its made up of a rod or something. Well use this technique to achieve this.

- Click here to see the video version of this tutorial.

- Open a new 500 x 200 sized PSD document.

- Write some texts. I used Impact font for this tutorial, and color I chose is (#00008C).

- Press CTRL and click on the T symbol from the layers palette. I should show you a image, of the thing I am trying to say here for better demonstration:

- Go to Select - Save Selection, and click ok without changing anything.

- Press CTRL + D to select the selection.

- Go to Layer - Delete - Layer to delete your text layer.

- Switch to your Channel Palette, if it isn't open then go to Window - Channels.

- On the Channel Palette, click on the Alpha 1 channel.

- Go to Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur, apply the following changes and click ok.

- Return to the Layers Palette, and click on the layer that says background on it.

- Go to Filter - Render - Lighting Effects, apply the following changes and click ok:

- Press CTRL + A, now click SHIFT + CTRL + J, this will turn the channel into a layer.

- Go to Select - Load Selection, apply the following changes and click ok:

- Go to Select - Modify - Expand, apply the following changes and click ok:

- Go to Select - Inverse, or press SHIFT + CTRL + I to make a inverse selection.

- Press Delete from the keyboard, and press CTRL + D to deselect the content.

[pagebreak title='Page 3'] - Go to Layer - Layer Style - Drop Shadow, and click ok.

- Change your background color to (#464646).

- Your final result should look similar to mine:

- And here's a tip, if you use metal effects, it will look better if your use silver color for the text, and to blend it nicely use dark-type background.