A friend of mine ask me a favor to transform his work into something like a gold medal, it was 1 o'clock AM and I'm a little sleepy and since I'm only waiting for my download completion I decided to kill some time.

He send me a bitmap file and told me that he made it using Microsoft paint, I do already have an idea on how to transform and make it more metallic, but I'm not a kind of person who receives a lot medals so I need to research more about how it looks like. (joke)

Anyway here's a copy, you can use it for this tutorial.

Open the file on photoshop, it was a flat image so we are going to break down all the elements, first we should eliminate the black background, grab your magic wand tool [W], click on the black background area and delete it.

Then [Ctrl Select] the layer to create a selection, while the marquee selection is still intact make a new layer and fill it with the same color.

Rename it and then toggle visibility, go back to previews layer and go to Select > Color Range, select the blue text and set the fuzziness to 154, press ok

While the selection is still intact hit [Ctrl J] it will make a duplicate of what ever you have selected into a new layer directly above it.

Now do the same with our center text, using color range we select the center text but this time you set the fuzziness to 50.

Hit [Ctrl J].

Rename all of them and put them in order.

Now that we successfully disassembled everything into layers time for our medal effect, first is to [Ctrl Select] our medal layer and using our radial gradient you should create something like this.

[Ctrl Select] the 'outer grave' layer, press [D] to reset palette and [Alt Del] to fill it with foreground color which is black.

Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur around 1.5 to 2.5 pixel as long as it is still readable.

Do the same on our 'center grave' layer.

Go to our 'center grave' and add the following layer style.

It should look like this.

Add the same layer style on our 'outer grave' layer.

Then add the following layer style on our medal layer.

Create a new layer, using your radial gradient tool create another medal effect but this time the light area must be more bigger, then set the blending mode to multiply and the opacity to 78.

Make another one but this time use the diamond gradient, set the blending mode into Hard Light and the opacity to 60.

The last one should be linear gradient, set the blending to hard light and the opacity to 83 percent.

And this is our final result, you can play with the layer style if you are not satisfied with the final result, go to bevel emboss and play with the shading angle and altitude.