I am having a crack at some new banners for my forum, I'm not sure if i told you or not but im not to good on the old graphics front, I can manage to get a drop shadow but i'm struggling to get the gradient effect that you used on the font, I am using photoshop 7 and i cant for the life of me figure it out.
Everytime i try to get the gradient in the text it just fills the whole banner. Can you please put me out of my misery and tell me the really simple thing is that im missing out

Simple.

Select the text layer > double click on it in the "layers" panel > select gradient from the list > click on the colour bar > select your colour

There is a tutorial here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache...ent+text&hl=en

thanks for that Hengis, I have been struggling with photoshop for a while now, I used to use paint shop pro before, but i have found that it just wasn't enough, even though my graphical skills need a lot of refining, im hoping that photoshop will help me do just that