Introduction 4 - Layer Styles

Monday, August 11 2008

Part One
This tutorial continues our Introduction to PhotoShop series and will introduce you to Layer Styles. Since they were implemented into PhotoShop, Layer Styles have exploded and become one of the most commonly-used features of the popular graphics creation software package. In this tutorial, we will look at how we use Layer Styles and what we can achieve with them.

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We will be using the document we created in Introduction 3 for this example. If you download and open the PSD, you will notice that we have several different layers, some of which have the fx logo on them:

We have already got a leaf shape from our last article, and this has a Layer Style applied to it. If we click the small black arrow next to the fx symbol, we will be shown the Styles that this particular layer currently has applied. We can turn these off and on by clicking on the Eye symbol next to each style:

We can click the arrow again to hide. To edit these Layer Styles, we can either double-click a blank area of the layer in the layer panel or right-click it and choose Layer Properties. Once we have the Layer Styles up for Shape 1, we can see that it has a Drop Shadow and a Gradient Overlay.


Click to enlarge.

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We can add more styles by simply clicking on them on the left - we can also remove the ones that are already checked, by clicking on the check mark on the left. When we do this, the styles will be added (or removed) in real time in the background, so we can see the impact our changes make without submitting. Let's go ahead and edit the drop shadow:


Click to enlarge.

When we click on it, you will notice the main area of the window changes to all the Drop Shadow options, which is split into two sections: Structure and Quality. We can manipulate exactly how the drop shadow will look using these values - we can change which direction it will face, what color it will be, how visible it will be, how big, etc. Click on the Black square next to the Blend Mode, and choose another color. Watch as the image in the background changes as you change the color. The blend mode is how the Drop Shadow will interact with the other layers. It is hard to see what the blend mode does, or is capable of when using with a drop shadow, but the same modes are available to the layer as a whole.

Let's also change the direction of the drop shadow - let's do 35 instead of -35, and take the opacity up to 100%. We'll also change the distance to 20, the spread to 10% and the size to 15. You should now have an idea of what each of these values does, and we get something like the following:

You will notice that the drop shadow no longer lines up with our spotlight. We will change this by deleting or hiding the bg layer, and then create a new layer at the bottom, and fill it white. Then go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects, and line up the spotlight somewhere where looks realistic. Like so:

Next, we can goto the Layer Styles of the bg layer we just created and choose Color Overlay. This should give us a red background (default color). We can change this color to whatever we want, and also change the Blend Mode to Multiply. This will leave the black background and just colorize our spotlight. We should have something that looks like this:

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We can then uncheck the Color Overlay, and choose Gradient Overlay. Color will override a gradient overlay. We want Blend Mode to be Multiply again, and we will choose a Radial Gradient, and then we can click the current gradient to make our own or choose another. For this example, we used the following gradient:


Click to enlarge.

The outcome of this was as follows:

We could change the gradient overlay on the shape, to make it look as though the light is actually shining on it. Open up Layer Styles for Shape 1, and then goto Gradient Overlay. Because it already has one, we will just change it to more of a blue color, and also reduce the opacity to 50%. We can also goto the document (with the Layer Styles still open) and click and drag the gradient position around. We will position it like so:


Click to enlarge.

There are other Layer Styles that were not addressed in this tutorial. These will be explained in Part Two.

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