This tutorial describes how to create a metallic effect using Curves in Photoshop.  I learned the technique from the book Photoshop 7 Down & Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby.  That book also describes a lot of other ways to create similar effects, including cool examples of how to apply the effect.  The actual poster for which I first applied this effect was an announcement for a birthday concert for my piano teacher.  The photograph is the piano in my living room, on a bright sunny day with the curtains closed. The grey curtains gave a nice filtered lighting and an interesting reflection in the piano lid.

So how to do this?  Start by creating a new document in RGB mode. Size doesn't matter, but I used 640x480 for this example.  Create some fairly large text using the type tool.  For the poster I used Edwardian Script at 360pt.  Now hold the Ctrl-key and click on the Type layer in the Layers palette to put a selection around your text.  Save this selection as a new channel, as shown below.

Now you can delete the Type layer.  This leaves you with an empty document, but you should have a new channel containing your text.  Go to the Channels palette and click on this channel.  Next, apply some Gaussian Blur.  Just 1 or 2 pixels is enough, more blur gives you a wider bevel later on.  Your document should now look like this (at 50%):

Now go back to the Layers palette and click on the Background layer.  Your document will appear to be empty again, but the next step is going to solve that.  Go to the Filter menu and choose Render → Lighting.  The only thing you have to change in the Dialog box is to set the Texture Channel to the channel containing your selection.

After clicking OK, this should make your selected text show up as if lighted from the lower right corner, as shown in the next picture.

After applying the Lighting effect, go to Adjustments and choose Curves.  Adjust the curve in the dialog box until it looks somewhat like the screen shot below.

You can play with adjusting the curve until you have the metallic effect you like.

The last thing you have to do is to remove the dark background.  You do this by first loading your selection, which will now be too small for your text because of the Gaussian Blur applied earlier.  Then you expand the selection in the Selection → Modify menu to include the entire letter.  After inverting the selection you can remove the background around the letter.

To finalize, you can add a drop shadow and/or a color overlay to create a gold look, and maybe add some more text.

You can’t use this in challenges, but for special occasions such as my poster it’s a pretty neat effect.  Have fun!