Design a 3D Newspaper Cropped Text Effect

When the older generation were young, and needed to create a school design or anything that involved cropping letters, we often cropped them first from an old newsprint, before proceeding to work with a colored paper. So this is pretty much what I wanted to create here — a newspapers cropped draft!

Let’s begin with making a new canvas and fill it with any solid color, our choice was #2b362b:

To give it a bit of depth, while the background is still selected, go to Layer Styles (Layer >> Layer Style >> Gradient Overlay) and apply the following settings.. This will give a lighter spot in the middle of the canvas that normally gives nice depth.

Now, find online or scan any newspaper pager. We couldn’t find one big sheet so we combined ours from a several ads in the local newspaper. Place the newspaper on the canvas.

Using a huge Cooper Black font, type your word on top of the newspapers layer. If you are using a different font, however, be sure to work with BOLD letters because the whole effect is based on the boldness of the typography.

Now it’s a little bit tricky for those of you who are still beginners, so please pay attention..

1. While the typed letters are still selected, hold the CTRL key and press on the layer with the word “News” in the layers panel, this will load a selection around your letters.
2. Go to Selection >> Modify >> Expand, and expand the selection by about 3-4 pixels. If your font is too narrow, you might want to use a bigger number.
3. Press Shift + Ctrl + I, to reverse the selection.
4. Press Delete.

I have played around with them just a bit and this is my result… Also try not to glue them too closely, else you will have difficulty applying the shadow later on.

Now load the selection of the “news” text, remember how to do that? Just hold the CTRL key pressed and click on the “news” layer the one we just re-arranged.

Create a new layer below the “news” layer and select it in the Layers Panel, so it will turn blue. While it’s blue and selected, Choose the Paint Bucket and fill the selection with black or very dark gray color. Please see our illustration below:

Press Ctrl + T while the shadow is still selected, and then right mouse click and choose “Wrap” from the small menu with option. Try to wrap your shadow in a way similar to ours, by dragging the corners of the square. When you are done, simply hit ENTER. Remember that if while working with the Wrap tool, you will switch view to a different canvas in your Photoshop, your work will be lost so finish and hit “enter” first!

Set the shadow layer’s blending mode to “Multiply” and about 75% opacity.

Load the selection of “news” text again, but now we are back to working with the newsletters layer.

Create a new layer on top of all the other layers, and select the Brush Tool with #FFFFFF (white) foreground color and very big, soft brush, we are using 200 pixels here. Apply a few dots on the edges of the text, to give it a nice gloss and gradient effect, we did here:

• at the bottom of “N” letter.
• at the top of “E” letter.
• at the bottom of “W” letter.
• at the top of “S” letter.

When you are done with the gloss application (remember that it has be very mild), set the opacity of this layer to 56%.

Next, get back to the newspaper layer and go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Bevel and Emboss. Apply the following settings, using the “Driven Snow” texture, which should come pre-installed in Photoshop CS2+ versions.

This will give a very mild yet visible effect of crumbled paper to the font. With the slight gradients and 3D shadows we have created, this text looks incredibly realistic on our screen. Hope you have enjoyed the tutorial and please feel free to download the psd file for learning purposes — FREE!

You are now left with 2 layers, cropped from newspapers letters and the typed letters layer, which you can now delete. (or hide, but you certainly not going to need it anymore!).

This is what you have left:

Using the Lasso Marquee Tool, crop each letter individually, and once selected, press Ctrl + T to start transforming. Align them in any fashion you want, but do not overdo this effect if you don’t want to end up with  a messed up canvas..