One of my favo­rite Ps CS5 fea­tu­res is without a doubt Repoussé, a prac­ti­cal way to con­vert 2D sha­pes or text into 3D objects. Here is something I did when beta-testing the pro­gram early this year.

Unfortunately, the text needs to be ras­te­ri­zed in order to apply the fil­ter (what means it can no lon­ger be edi­ted), so dou­ble check your spel­ling before tur­ning your texts into 3D. As a wor­ka­round, you can dupli­cate the text layer and hide the bac­kup copy.

My 3D ren­de­ring doesn’t look very good because I didn’t have the pati­ence to wait it ren­der in the final qua­lity (or the hor­se­power to make it quic­ker). Here I used the V-Ray Draft qua­lity, which was just good enough to my tests. Rendering 3D in Photoshop, like in any 3D pro­gram, is a very inten­sive task, so having a nice CPU, lots of RAM and a good GPU with the latest dri­vers is the best way to go if you intend to fully explore the 3D fea­tu­res of Photoshop CS5 Extended.