You will automatically be on your background layer in the layers palette. Press ‘G’ or choose your gradient tool. Now go to the gradient options bar and choose black to white foreground to background gradient on linear. Now just click and swipe down as shown to get a nice black to white gradient. This will serve as our background.

Go to your ‘T’ext tool. Choose the IMPACT font. I like having the Character palette available (choose it from the View menu). You can also use the options bar at the top to choose your fonts and size. Type in some text with these settings.
 

Now click on the layer in the layers palette to get out of the text editing field and choose Gradient Overlay from the pop-up layer styles menu on the lower left.

Now you are simply going to create a gradient overlay layer style onto your text layer. You can use these exact settings if you want but I want you to look at the design and effect to decide what you think works best for your sitchee-ation.

Note how I’ve adjusted the angle to show some extra white in the lower right corner.

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