Grab your artsiest robe, your best wand for charms, turn up some wicked wizard rock, roll up your sleeves, and get ready to make some Photoshop Magic!

You’ll learn how to make this Silver Text using this Photoshop tutorial, which is similar to the text used in Harry Potter movie titles.

You’ll learn how to adjust different text properties (kerning, tracking, and baseline shifts) as well as layer styles.

This Silver Text can easily be adjusted to make Gold, Bronze, or Bright-Green Polka-dotted (if you’re so inclined) text as well, so head on after the break to get started!

Here is the original Harry Potter text found in the movie posters:

I’ll just give you a quick walkthrough first on how to load up fonts in Photoshop.

First you’ll need to get your paws on a Harry Potter font. Download the Harry Potter Cover font here.

Unzip the file and save it to your Windows Fonts folder.

Now head on over to Photoshop and pull down the text menu, looking for the font Harry P. It should be there automatically - if not, try restarting Photoshop and it should appear.

Now we’re ready to get started! Create your canvas - mine is 500×300. I just slapped on a subtle background onto it (feel free to make your own or just copy it for now).

Using the Text Tool write out Harry Potter using your new font. Adjust the size to fill the canvas.

We need to adjust the spacing between the letters - as it stands now, most of them are too far apart (when compared with the movie poster). There are two ways to do this: you can select two characters and adjust the tracking, or the kerning. Generally you would use tracking to shrink the gaps between letters for the entire word, then go back and fine tune them with kerning. However you do it is up to you though! For this tutorial I’ll just use tracking for simplicity’s sake.
Select the first two letters.

Adjust the tracking until the letters H and a look sufficiently close together.

Continue manually adjust the other letters in the title (use the movie poster for reference), squeezing in the spaces of expanding them where necessary.

Now we add a bit of character to the text by raising some letters a hint. Let’s drag the second r up - it’s slightly raised in the movie poster. There’s an easy way to shift this upwards without making a new text layer! Simply select the r:

And set the baseline shift up a few pixels.

This should push the r upwards!

Baseline shifts also work with negative numbers. Try selecting the second t and shift it downwards a few pixels.

Now that we’ve got our text set up, head on to the next page to learn how to apply the layer style to make your text shine!

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