I'm going to show you one of the ways I like to make web 2.0 style text in Photoshop.

Step one...
Open a new image:

Step two.

Type some text:

Step 3.

Apply a layer effect. This one is for Graident Overlay:

Step 4.

Select your text layer to produce "marching ants":

Step 5.

Go to: Select > Modify > Contract
Contract by 3px. (more or less depending the font used)

Step 6.

Open a new layer on top & fill in white:

Step 7.

Set the white layer to 35% opacity.

Step 8.

Make an oval selection and delete that area. This creates the white web 2.0 "shine".

Step 9.

Add some bevel emboss to the text layer.

Step 10.

Add a stroke. I like to select the color of the fade and then pick a darker version of that color.
So in this example the text is pink, so the stroke is violet.

Step 11.

Add some drop shadow.
Again I do this with a darker version of the text color.

Step 12.

You could be done at this point, but I'm going to show you how to add the color rays behind the letters.

I take the Polygonal Lasso Tool and make selections starting outside of the canvas to the center then out again, over, back to center... this continues until I am back to where I started.

At that point it looks like this.


Add a color:


Turn the opacity down a bit:


We are done.
The final version I have looks like this:


I added some bevel, swriled the the light rays with liquify, cropped the image... etc. None of this is part of making the "web 2.0" stuff, so I left it out of the tutorial... but this is just one example of a final result.

More to come.

nice tutorial Brian, I need to try that one out.

Thanks!