Letterpress in Photoshop

First step is to create a background layer with a desired color. I’m choosing 10% gray for the sake of this tutorial because I can easily lighten and darken colors later on.

After that create some text in a color that is a few shades darker than your background color. I chose 30% gray.

Duplicate your text layer two times and name them something significant like “dark” and “light”.

Order the layers with the original text on top and the two duplicated text layers directly underneath it – their order does not matter.

Add an “Inner Glow” layer style to the text you just made. Make sure you have these settings for the inner glow:
• It’s blend mode should be normal.
• The opacity should be 90%
• The color should be significantly darker than the text. I chose 70% gray.
• The source should be from the edge.
• It’s size can vary depending on your canvas size. My canvas is 1000×200 so my size is 5px.

After that add a “Color Overlay” layer style to the dark layer you made in step 3. It’s color should be the same color you used for the inner glow.

Once the color is changed move the dark layer up two pixels.

With that moved repeat the previous two steps for the light layer except instead of a dark color choose white and instead of moving it up move it down two pixels.

And that is it. You now should have some text that looks like it has a letterpress treatment applied to it.