Creative Layer Styles in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Layer Styles in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class on working with layer styles in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, I'll show you how to create effects using reusable and shareable layer styles in Photoshop. We'll look at how layer styles work and how to create your own. As layer styles are often used for text effects, you'll see how to find, download, install, and use layer styles that you find online. I'll also explain how you can save the layer styles that you make as digital assets which can be sold or given away as marketing collateral. I'll also show you a couple of little known applications for layer styles, including creating an overlay for text using a gradient, and a layer style that converts an image to black and white. As always, you'll learn valuable Photoshop techniques as you work through this class, techniques that you can put into action in your Photoshop workflow every day. Enough from me, if you're ready, let's get started creating effects using layer styles in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 Layer Style Basics: To get started with our look at glass styles in Photoshop, we're going to look at just the basics here. Now, I have an illustration, it has a background layer, there's a shape here for the doughnut itself, there's a shape for the icing, and then I have the sprinkles on another layer, and they're just masked with this mask. It's a fairly standard illustration. I'm going to select icing layer because I'm going to put a glow around the edges here. Now, the goal is going to go on the edges of the shapes, so it'll be on the outside as well as the inside edge. With the shape layer selected and this could just be a layer that has pixels on it, doesn't have to be a sharp layer. You'll just click here on the fx icon to get access to your last styles. We're going to choose an inner glow layer style so I'll just click on that. Now, if you've been in the last styles dialogue previously, you may not have day setting these are the defaults. If you want to ever default back to what the settings were when you first bought Photoshop, click here on reset to default on that just resets it back. That can be handy because you can get all effects here in your last menu that you weren't expecting to see and they're sticky. You might not have been in here for say, even years and you're still going to get those settings that you used previously. For our Inner Glow, we're going to use a color that will lighten this area. Now, while you might be tempted to choose a blue color, that's not always the best idea and I'll show you why. I'll click on the color selector here and instead of selecting this blue color which I could do by just clicking here on the color in the illustration and that would selected here, I'm going for a gray. I'm going to choose a gray something like this and click Okay. Because we want to go lighter without grow, we're going to use screen blend mode, but be aware that with these last styles, even though it's called integral, you could use it as a shadow for example. You could use it with a darkening effect, you'd choose a darker color, but you choose a different blend mode and for darkening you choose something like multiply. But we're using screen because we wanted to lighten this up, we actually want to use a glow. So the opacity is going to give us a deeper or a more transparent glow, so I'm going to wind this up to somewhere around 70-75 and you can start seeing the glow around here. But really what we need to adjust is the size of the glow and that's here. I'm just going to increase the size and when I do that, you can see this lightning effect and obviously it's way too much, so I'm going to bring back the opacity just so we can see through the effect a little bit. Now, the contour is how the glow locks, you can change that, you can click here and get access to other contours. Now, you're going to get funny effects with things that go up and then down, but something like this would be an alternative or smoother, curvy glow at the edge, but I think I'm going to use this linear one just stick with that. When we're happy with the glow that we've got, I'll click Okay. Now, the reason why I didn't use blue was that, I want to use this same glow effect, the same integral on my doughnut as well. I can do that by copying this effect, so I'm going to make sure that I have this shape last selected now I can actually select the effect itself, but I can just select the Shape Layer. If I right-click here, I can choose copy last star because the last style is attached to the layer. Now, I can go to the doughnut layer, select age, right click and choose paste layer style. That paste that same layer style onto my doughnut and out for a little bit difficult to say because of the color of the background, let me just fill this with black. Let's zoom in so that we can see this last star. Now, if I turn the eyeball is visibility icon on and off, you'll say that the last style is then applied or removed from this doughnut. Now, the reason why I chose gray rather than blue is that gray is a neutral color. It's going to lighten anything that is placed against. Whereas if I'd use blue, then I would have been throwing a blue glow into my doughnut, not something I particularly wanted to do. Now, I'm going back to a white fill on this background last, I'm just going to fill it with white again. We're going to use a Layer Style to actually color the background. To do this, I'll select on the background black and I'll click fx, and I'm going to add a pattern. So I'll go to Pattern Overlay, now, last time I was in this dialogue, I used this pattern, I'm just going to reset it to the default which is probably I think the first pattern in my patent list. Yes it is not the pattern I wanted to use. I'm actually going to use the last pattern in my pattern list which is one that I just created for this class. It's just a little polka dot pattern. Now you can select any pattern that you like from your patent collection for your overlay. If you don't have enough patterns, you can click the gear icon here and go and access other patterns. So there are patents that are shipped with Photoshop. Also if you saved your own patterns, you would have some additional patterns here. Just be aware that when you do select a pattern, for example, legacy patterns, you'll probably want to append them rather than click OK. Because if you click okay, you are going to replace all these existing patterns. If you click Append, you're going to add these to the end of your pattern collection. I'm going to do that right now, but that's how you would do it. Now you can scale your pattern, so I'm going to bring down the scale because I want smaller dots. You can also blend it in but right now we don't have anything to blended it into because we've just got white underneath. But you can also adjust the opacity and in this case, I want to bring down the dots so that they're more opaque. They just filling in the background gently. Now, in addition to the pattern that I also want to add some color, so I'm going to click here on color overlay. Now, there's two color overlays, that's because in recent versions of Photoshop, we're actually able to use multiple layer styles of the same type. We can have multiple color overlays, we can have multiple strokes for example. I've just selected one of them this I don't think is the default, let me just reset it and apparently it is the default so let's go and get a color to use. Now, I want a very pale turquoise color, so let's go and get that pale turquoise color to use. Now, that's covered up my patent underneath, so I am going to choose a blend mode for this. I'll choose multiply and now I've got the color overlay interacting with the pattern, so that I can actually see the pattern with the color. You can also adjust the opacity of the last saw, you could make it more or less opaque. You can just click here to select again and change your colleagues, you can also sample a color from your illustration. Should you wish to do that? I'm just going to cancel out of here, I'm quite happy with my colors and click Okay. Here is our background layer and here are the effects. This is the pattern I overlay which we can turn on and off, and the color overlay which we can turn on and off. If we turn effects off, then we're turning off the entire set of layer styles, and we can build up lots and lots of layer styles here. They remain fully editable, so if I double-click on the effect here, I'm going back to the last style dialogue, here's the pattern overlay, I could adjust that, here's the color overlay I can select these and adjust that. 3. Pt 2 Move Copy and Clear Layer Styles: In the previous video, we learned how to create some basic Layer Styles in Photoshop. There are some techniques involved in working with Layer Styles that we're going to look at right now. I'm going to open up the Layers panel so that we can have it visible here. One of the things you may want to do with a Layer Style is to actually remove it, so I'm going to remove the Glow Layer Style from the doughnuts, so I'll target the doughnut layer here. Click the Layer Style area here and I'll choose Clear Layer Style. When I do that, any Layer Styles and all the Layer Styles that are applied to that layer are going to disappear, and so there they are, they've now been removed. You may sometimes want to move a Layer Styles, so I've got a Layer Style the Inner Glow on this particular layer which of course is the icing layer. If I want to move it onto the doughnut layer, I can just drag on the name of the Layer Style and drop it onto the doughnut, and you can say that it's been moved from the icing and it now appears around the age of the doughnut itself. You can also copy Layer Styles. Now we saw that earlier by right-clicking and choose Copy Layer Style and then you right-click the layer you want to paste it onto and choose Paste Layer Style. But there's another way of doing that. In this case, we'll select the layer that has the style that we want to copy and it's important that you press the Alt or the Option K and hold them down before you begin because then if you drag on the style name, you'll see that you get these two supreme-posed arrows, the black one in the front and the white one in the back. That tells you you're copying and you can simply drop it onto this layer to get a duplicate. I'm just going to undo that because if you start dragging and then add the Alt Option K, then you don't get those two little arrows, and so you would be moving rather than copying. Just be aware that it's critical that you have the Alt Option K selected or press down before you start dragging, otherwise you won't see those two arrows. Let's go ahead now and let's replace the Inner Glow here on the doughnut with a Drop Shadow, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to clear this Layer Style and I'm going to add a Drop Shadow. Let's just reset this to default. Now with a Drop Shadow and some of the other Layer Styles, you can actually drag on the image to drag the Drop Shadow into position and that allows you to size it and position it wherever you want without having to adjust the slide is here to get it right. Now there is something that is a little unusual, I think in terms of the Drop Shadow Layer Style in Photoshop and that is that the size actually just feathers it, so when we go to Size we're actually feathering it and softening it. If we want it to be bigger, then we go to Spread, so you might find that confusing the way I do and if you do just be aware that the way that Photoshop names is, I think a little bit strange, I would have thought that this would have been softness or something. But we now have a Drop Shadow, so I'm going just click "OK". There maybe circumstances that you run into where you want this Drop Shadow on the image but you'd like and on its own layer, so you don't want it to be a Layer Style, you'd actually like to have a layer that is the Drop Shadow. Well, you can do that, You'll simply right-click the effect here and choose Create Layer. You'll get a warning that some aspects of the effects can't be reproduced with layers, Just click "OK" because most of them can. Now we don't have a Drop Shadow Layer Style any longer on the doughnut layer but we do have a separate layer that is now the Drop Shadow, and it's got something happening with it. You can see these little icons here, there's something about this layer that is unusual, it's got Advanced Blending options. We can double-click this icon to say what they are. Well, the Blending that it has is a Multiply Blend Mode and you'll see too that the Fill Opacity is dropped down considerably, so that little indicator is just telling you that this is not a solid shape, there are some blends there that are creating that shape. 4. Pt 3 Create a Layer Style for Text: When you think about layer styles are in Photoshop, typically you will think about text because layer styles just lend themselves to text effects. So we're going to create this effect now and we're going to do it for a couple of reasons. One, because we're going to see how to build up quite a complex text effect that is actually pretty easy. We're also going to see how we can save this and reuse it over and over again. So I'm going to start with a brand new document. I'll choose File and then New. Now the base document I'm going to be working on his 1920 by 1080, and of course we're working in RGB color mode. My background is white. It doesn't really matter what color background you're using. I'll click Create. Now I am going to fill the background with this green color that I have here. So I'm going to open up my last panel because this color is my foreground color, I'll press Alt Backspace, that would be Option Delete on a Mac, to fill my layer with that color. Let's now put on our techs. I'm going to the type tool. I'm going to set my top to 400 because that's a good size for this document, and I'm using a font called And Then It Ends, it's a really lovely font and it is a freely downloadable font. So I'm going to give you a download link for that. I'm just going to type the word happy. Now, it's going the same green color as my background. Let me just go and select over it, and let's choose a different color. Let's make it a black for now. Now, this is the lower case font. I actually want to use uppercase. So I'm just going to type over the top again. I just like A better in the uppercase font. So now we've got our type and we've got our background. We're ready to start putting together the last styles. But one of the styles that we're going to use is actually a Polka dot pattern. We're going to have to go and create our own Polka dot pattern. So let's just go and create a brand new file. I'll choose File and New. Now, I'm just going to make a document that's 200 by 200 pixels in size, again, RGB color. But this one, I want to have a transparent background. That's really important. So I'll just click Create. Let's zoom in so we can see the document more clearly. I'm going to draw a circle. I can do that with the Shape tool or I could do it with the Marquee tool and just fill it. I'm going to fill it with a black color, so I'll let's go for the fill here and let's select black. Going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a smallish circle. I'm also adding the Spacebar at this point, because I want to position it immediately over the middle of the document. If you don't get it perfectly in place, let's just go and say what you'll do. You'll select this and then press Control or Command A, and then you get these align options which allow you to align the shape here to the art-board that you're working on. It's confusing thing to do because you think that by the time you've got this selected Control A is not going to do much else, but it does and this works. I'm just going to deselect my selection with Select, Deselect. Now, I want to buzz this out into the corners of the document, so I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer, just drag it onto the New Layer icon. You can also press Control or Command J. This shape we're going to apply a filter to so choose Filter, Other, and we're going to do an Offset filter. Now, we can't break this shape up because it is a shape so we're going to have to either convert it to a smart object or rasterize it. We're just going to rasterize it. In the Offset filter, you're going to type in here half the width and half the height of the document. Now document was 200 by 200. So that means that half the height is 100, and half the width is 100. So I'm just typing a 100 and 100 here. Wraparound, click Okay and this is the design that's going to be a very spaced out Polka dot pattern. Again, I'll choose, select and then All, that would be Control or Command A. I'll go to Edit and we're going to choose Define Pattern, I'm going to call this Polka dot. I'll click, Okay. That pattern is now saved to our pattern collection so we can use it for the text. So I'm just going to close this file. I don't need to save it, because we don't need it any longer. Now, for this effect, we're going to start by putting a border around our type. So we'll select the type, we'll click the fx button and we're going to choose Stroke. Now, I'm just going to reset this to the default so that we get the default Stroke. We're going to add a white Stroke. So I'm going to select from the color. I'm just going to go up here to 255, 255, 255 RGB. That's a nice white Stroke. For the width of the strike I want it to be a bit wider site. I'm going to take it up to five or six. It just needs to be a little bit deeper. It's going around the outside, so I'm going to select outside. So that's giving me a nice border around my type. I think I just might take it up to six pixels. So if you want a border around your type, that's what you're going to do. Just put a stroke on it. You can position it outside, inside or on the center. But for this effect, we're just going for outside. The next thing we want to do is to fill a text with the pattern. The problem is that the pattern is black and white dots and the text is black and so we're not going to see the pattern at all if we have our text filled with black. What we'll do is we'll go up here to the Blending Options and we can actually adjust the Fill Opacity. So what I'm going to do is actually remove the fill from this text. Now this is exactly the same as adjusting this fill here. One of the interesting things about last styles, if you set the fill at zero percent, you're still going to get the last style. You're just not going to get the original fill in your type. Now that's very different to setting the opacity to zero. So if you set the opacity to zero, you're setting the opacity for the text as well as any of the layer effects. You can see that you're not seeing anything at all. So there's a big difference here in setting Opacity to a value and Fill to a value, and for this one we're going to set Fill to nothing at all so that we're only seeing the effects. So let's go back into the effects, double-click here and we're going to apply our pattern. This time we've got nothing in the middle so the pattern is going to work. Let's go and select the Pattern Overlay. Now, the pattern is going to default to the very last pattern that you created, which is this one here, that's a pattern that I just created. You can increase or decrease the scale so you can just work out how big you want your dots to be. Don't want them to be a particularly big some thinking about 10 percent on this will be just fine. So now we have the border around our type and we have this Pattern Fill. The next thing that we're going to do is to apply our pink color, so for this, we're going to color overlay. If I'm going to click here on Color Overlay, let me just reset it to the default. The default is a gray color and it's a normal blend mode, so we've lost our pattern. Well, let's just double-click on this and go and get a pink color to use, but you can use whatever color you like. I just happen to think the pink is pretty smart here. Now to be able to see our pattern, we can do it one of two ways. We could change the blend mode of this layer, but we could also just dial down the opacity. When we adjust the opacity down, we're making it less bright pink if you like, and so we're able to see the pattern through it. At this point, you may want to just brighten up your colors here because you might find that reducing the opacity just tends to kill off your colors so you might want to brighten that up a little bit. Now one method of getting some dimensional appearance in this type is to add an image shadow. What we can do is to put a inner shadow in-between the line here and the background and that's going to make it look a little more dimensional. I'm going to click here on "Inner Shadow". If you don't see Inner Shadow in the list, just go to the effects icon, you can select it here. Just going to reset this to the default, the default is a black shadow at 35 percent. It uses Global Light and it's just a bog standard shadows, there's nothing particularly special about this shadow. The settings that we're going to use is to increase the opacity just a little bit, just to bump it up a little bit further. The distance of three pixels is the distance of the shadow in here. That's looking pretty good, but the size is going to be the softness of it. I'm going to increase the size a bit. They don't want it to be so harsh, I want it to be a little softer. I'm thinking somewhere between 20 and 30 is a reasonable value for the size of the shadow here, of course, that is the softness, not the actual distance. Now we've got this dimensional look, the final thing that we need is to make it look a little bit more 3D, a bit more puffy. For this we'll choose a Bevel & Emboss. I'm going to Bevel & Emboss. Let's just reset that to the default settings. The settings we're going to use for Bevel & Emboss are that we're going to use what's called an outer bevel. Let's just go to Outer Bevel, it's puffing up just a little bit. For depth, I'm going to wind the depths up quite a bit and you can select between up and down. For this one, I'm going to choose down, but you can just decide what looks better for you, I prefer down. For the size, I want it to be quite a sizable bevel, so I'm going to increase this up to probably around the 30 mark. That's giving us this dimensional look, so there is a highlight down here and a shadow up the top. I don't like the highlight for this effect so I want to turn the highlight off. Here is the highlight down here, the way I can turn it off is to just remove it. I'm going to take this highlight all the way down to zero opacity, which effectively is removing it, which leaves me with my shadow in place. The shadow is up to about 50 percent, I think it's a bit too much for me, so I'm just going to back it off a little bit, just soften it a little bit. Let's see what this Bevel & Emboss gave us. It gave us a whole heap of things happening with this text. It's got this pillow look to it, it's certainly dimensional, it's giving us this shadow. You could choose a highlight if you want it, I don't particularly like highlights so I am removing the highlights, but you could use that if you wanted. Now that we're done with this, I can just click "Okay". So we have this set of effects that are all on this base piece of type. Of course we're not going to see the type if we turn the effects off because we've set the fill to zero, but we can save this effect. One of the nice thing about these last styles in Photoshop is that you can save them and reuse them. What I'll do is double-click to go back to the last style dialogue and I'll click here on "New Style" and I'm just going to give this a name. I'm calling it Pink polkadot dimensional text. I do want to include the layer Blending Options because that has the layer at a zero percent fill. That's really important and I obviously do want to include the layer effects. I'll click "Okay". Now we can reuse this effect anytime. I'll choose "File" and then "New". I'm going back to a document that is the size of my art board. I'm going to fill it with the same green color for now, I'll add a brand new layer. For this I'm going to just place a white shape on it, let's just drag out a rectangle. I'm going to fill it with white by pressing "Alt Backspace", that would be option delete on the Mac. Now it's important that you put this shape on a layer by itself because you need to apply the last styles to this shape, it doesn't get applied to the background. I'll choose "Select", "Deselect". Now the last style that we just saved is able to be applied to this layer by choosing "Window" and then "Styles". We will find our layer style at the very bottom of the layer style fill here so I'm just going to click on it. The last style is now applied to this shape. But one thing that you might notice is that while the last style looked really good on this text, which is quite a bit smaller, it doesn't look quite as good on a large shape. That's a feature of last styles. When they're applied, they're applied at the same size as they were when you actually created them, but they don't have to stay that way. If we right-click on the last styles here, we can select scale effect and so we could increase this too, for example, around 200 or 300. So we can scale the entire effect to better suit the size, shape that we're working with. Let me just turn that off, let's go and create a piece of type. I'm going to use a different font this time, I'm using the font Aquino. I love this font because it has a really, really lovely shaped. I'm just going to size it down a little bit. Again this is a font that you can download, so I'll give you the download link for that as well. I've got my type layer selected, I'll go back to my styles here by just clicking on the Styles panel. Just scroll down to the very bottom and apply the style to the type. Now this is just applied in exactly the same length if we built it up by hand so if you want to change the colors, you can do so. I'll go to the color overlay, for example and I want to change the color here to turquoise blue. I'll just select a turquoise blue to use and the entire effect is re-colored appropriately. You're not doing anything by using a layer style so if you find a layer style that you want to use, there's nothing in here that you couldn't create by hand in Photoshop. It's just that saved as a last style means that you can apply a whole series of effects at once without having to build them up one at a time, and it can save a lot of time. You're going to find a lot of last styles online, particularly for use with texts. In the next video, we're going to see how to download and install them so that you can use them yourself. 5. Pt 4 Download Install and Use Layer Styles: It's time now to have a look at layer styles that we'll download and install from the web. Now, you're going to find that there are thousands upon thousands of layer styles out there. Typically they are used for text, but there's nothing that says that because they are used for text you can't use them on shapes. It's just that layer styles are a really easy way of delivering really complex text to fix to customers. Most of the layer styles that you see out there are going to be advertised as usable on text, but they can be used just as easily on shapes. You just might not get results that are as compelling to you as those you're going to get on text. I've pre-prepared this document. It has a background which is just white and a piece of text, and the text is still fully editable. We can select over these characters, and we could edit it. The font that I'm using is called [inaudible]. I'm going to give you a download link for this font because I think it's just an awesome font. But let's go and have a look at the layer style that we're going to use. The reason why I've typed brown cow is that, the layer style that we're going to use reminds me of the coat of an Ayrshire cow. Let's just go and have a look at it. This is the one we're going to use. It's from Deviant Art. It's a white layer style with some brown splotches on it. Now this layer style is delivered as an ASL file, that's a layer style file. About half of the layer styles that you're going to find online will be delivered that way. The other half are going to be delivered as PSD files like this Choco one. It's delivered as a full PSD file. I'm going to have a look at that as well, but this one is a layer style file. I'll give you the download link for it. I'm going to click to download it. Now, I've found a couple of times when I've gone to download this style that I've ended up with an HTM file, which is the web page file, so if that happens to you, just reload the page and try again because what you want is the zip file, the HTM file is not what you want, the zip file is what you want. I'm just going to open that up in my downloads folder, double-click on it. Now, on the Mac, that's going to automatically extract this file from the zip file, on a PC you're probably going to have to do it yourself. I'm going to click here to extract all files and I'll just click Extract. Here is the file now extracted and ready to use. But I want to add this to my Photoshop styles lists so that I can use it in any time, so I'm going to install it. I'll right-click on it and choose Copy and then I'll go to my users area and I want to go to AppData, we'll choose roaming, and then Adobe, and then we'll choose the version of Photoshop that we're using. In this case, it's CC 2019. I'll go to Presets, and then I'll go to Styles, and I'm going to put this style in this location. I'll just right-click and choose Paste. Now that it's pasted into that area, it's going to be easy for me to be able to locate it and use it inside Photoshop. On the Mac, you're going to right-click the ASL file, and then go to the Libraries area which you can get to by pressing Shift-Command-L. In the Library area, you will locate the application support folder, and then the Adobe folder, and then the version of Photoshop that you're using. Once you do that, click Presets, then go to Styles, and then right-click and paste the file in. Once the file is located there you can restart Photoshop to get access to that layer style on the Mac. At this point, it would be prudent for me to close and reopen Photoshop. I'm going to do just that. Now that I've closed and reopened Photoshop, that style is going to be available in my Styles panel. I'm going to make sure that I have the text selected. I'll choose Window, and then Styles. At the very bottom of my styles list is going to be the style that I just opened. It's called style 33. I'll click it to apply it to the text. Now it's not looking quite the same on my text as it is on this piece of text. The reason is the scale of the effect. What I'll do is go back to the last panel, I'll right-click on the style area here and choose Scale Effects. It needs to be much bigger. I'm starting at 250 percent but I think that's a little bit too small still. Let's try 400. That's a whole lot more like the effect that we're seeing here. I'll click "Okay". Now if we want to double-check how it looks let's go back and have a look at this. This has got a gray background behind it. Lets go and replicate that gray background. I'll click here on the Background, I'm going to double-click, and we'll select a darkish gray. I've got that as my foreground color, so I'll press Alt-backspace. That would be option delete on the Mac, and that just fills that background layer with the color. Now if you want to make this a little bit lighter and brighter, you can do so, but you might encounter something that is a little unusual about these layer styles. I've got my type layer selected here. Let's go and add an adjustment layer. With new adjustment layer, I'm going to use curves because that will allow me to lighten this. All I need do is drag up on the curve. The problem is that I'm altering the background and the type together. What I want to do is to clip this. I'll click here on the clipping option and what that does in the last pallet is clips this effect to only the layer below. It's going to affect only the type. Let's double-click on this again and let's adjust the effect, but nothing's happening. That is going to be surprising to you probably in terms of using adjustment layers with layer styles in Photoshop. This should lighten this text and it's not doing so. Well, let's see how we can make it do that. I'm going back to the last panel, I've got my type layer selected here, I'm going to click to add a new group and I'm going to put my type layer in that group. I'm just going to drag and drop it into group and close up the group. I'm going to reverse the order of the group and the curves adjustment. I'm just going to place the group underneath the curves adjustment and now, I'm going to create that clipping mask by double-clicking here and just click here to create the clipping mask. Now the curves adjustment is working as we expect it to and it's having an effect on the type. You're going to need to place your type object with its attendant layer styles into a group and then apply your curves adjustment or whatever adjustment you're using here to that group and then you'll get the result that you're looking for. Here is that group, we've got our type object inside that group, and so now our curves adjustment is working as expected. It's having an effect on the type object which it wasn't previously when we didn't have the type object inside a group. 6. Pt 5 Download Install and Use PSD Style Files: Now the second type of layer style that we looked at downloading from the Web is one that arrives as a PSD file. Again, I'm going to give you the download link for this particular effect. I'm going to click to download the file. Now be aware that some of these files will do better if you have some fonts installed. This one uses the font Aka Dylan, and I've given you a download link for that font. It's available from dafont.com. You'll probably want to download and install that font before you actually open the file in Photoshop so you don't get font errors and so that you can actually make your text look like the text that you're seeing on the screen here now. I've already downloaded and installed, Aka Dylan. I'm just waiting for this download of this particular PSD file to take place and it's now downloaded. I'll click here to show it inside my downloads folder. Double-click on it, and then I can see what's inside the zip file. It's a JPEG file and a PSD file. So it's obviously the PSD file that I'm going to need to open and use in Photoshop. But let's extract all these files into their own folder. Now it looks like I've done that previously, so let's just go and use those that I've already expanded. Here's the PSD file. I'm going to drag and drop it onto my Photoshop icon. Let's take it up here and drop it so that we can see it. Now it looks like I didn't get one of those fonts which is Northwest Irregular. It looks like it's used here. For this effect, I don't need it. I'm just going to click, "Don't Resolve". Here is the Choco texts, but that's okay because I do have that font installed. I'm going to click on the "Type object" here now and I'm going to make changes to it. Now there are four instances in total in this file of that particular Type object. You want to make sure that you select each of them in turn, select the type and then type the word that you want to show in this effect. Once you've done that, you can have a look and see how each of the effects is applied to the type. Let's just zoom in and have a look. This first effect is adding these polka dots that are sort of a lightning effect. This is the main effect here. Let's turn it on and off. You can see that it's got most of the internal effects for the type are applied using this particular layer style and then the two last styles here that are having to do with the shadow effects behind everything. With a file like this, what you're getting is an entire sort of package deal. You're getting the background, you are getting this sort of layer of chocolate here and you're also getting all the layer styles put together are building up this text effect. Just be aware that when you download layer styles, that you're likely to get one of two formats, either a usable ASL file that you can just add to your styles list and use whenever you like or sometimes an entire file that comes with a whole heap of elements that gives you a sort of package that you can use. But in most cases where you'll want to use the entire package rather than just have the style tucked away so that you could use that in other projects. 7. Pt 6 Copyspace Layer Style: In the previous video, we looked at some layer styles that were designed predominantly for text. It's time now to have a look at some last styles that we're going to design to use with photos. I'm going to show you up ahead of time exactly what we're going to create in this video because it will help you to have an idea as to what we're aiming for. This is some copies space. What I've done is added an effect to the image that is just a white semi-transparent rectangle across the bottom of the image. This would allow me to play some text over the top of it, it would be nice and legible. We're going to create this style now. I'm going to get rid of this one so I'm going to trash it so we can start afresh. When you open your image it has the lock icon here, you'll click on it to unlock the image layer. If you're working with an earlier version of Photoshop, you might need to drop the lock icon, just pick it up and drop it onto the trash, to unlock that layer. We're going to add a gradient overlay. I click the "Fx Icon" and choose "Gradient Overlay". This is the default gradient overlay, I click "Reset to default", this is exactly what we're going to say. Well, I'm going to use the Screen blend mode here. I'm going to start by adjusting it to the Screen blend mode. At the moment the gradient is sort of gray to white. I'm going to click here and going to set it to white to white. I'II double-click on that stop that was gray and just make it white. Now that's in fact blocked out everything on this image. What we need to do now is to start adjusting the opacity of the gradient. I'm going to start at this end, and this is the opacity setting here. This is the color, this is the opacity. At the moment it's set to 100 percent, I'm going to set it to zero. I'm going to go to this end it and I'm going to set that to zero as well. Effectively we've removed the gradient for now. It's still there, but because it's zero opacity at either end, we're not saying anything at all. Well, if I click one of these stops, I can make a copy of it. I'm clicking this first one and going to make a copy of it about here. This one, I'm going to take to 75 percent opacity. We're starting to build in the copy space. I'm going to do the same about here, which is going to be represented by a position of about here on the gradient. I'm going to click here and it's a 75 percent opacity. All that we have to do is to change the transition point. Instead of at transitioning between 0-75 percent opacity at about this point. We want this point to be closer to here. Now I can pick it up and move it. That's more solid transition point. You can see it here. Let's see what we can do with the other one. I'm going to click here and here's this transition point, and pick it up and walk it back. Now there is a position where I can't walk it back to. It's not going to come any closer. It's not actually going to solve all of our problems unless you're happy with the copies space looking like this, but I won't mine to have hard edges, this is what I'm going to do. This is 0 percent, this is 75 percent. What I'm going to do is put another one in here that is 0 percent. I'm going to click on it, I'm going to set its opacity to 0 percent. Then I'm going to move it right up to write on top of this one here. That's going to give me my hard line. They're both at position 10. You can see them at Location 10. I'm going to do the same thing here. This is the one that has an opacity of 75 percent where I want to put something immediately on top of it that has an opacity of zero. Let's go and just make that, I'm going to click on it, set its opacity to zero, and then I'm going to move it on top. Now you can say that the gradient is changing. Just look at the gradient dialogue that I'm working in here, you can say that if I pull it too far, things go awry. But if I move it just to the right position and see the gradient appearing just in the middle here. That's exactly what I'm seeing on the image. Now phase our position correctly, you can just move them. Just going to grab this and position them a little bit further down the image. I'm going to move this top one just to show you how it's going to be done. Going to move one. I'm going to move the other and going to keep an eye on this gradient bar to make sure that when I position it, it's in the exact right spot to put the gradient in this area alone. When I'm done, I'll just click "Ok". If you want to be able to reuse this, then you can click "New style" to create a new style from it. I'm going to call this copy space, and to include lab Blending Options and I'll click "OK" and then "OK" again. Now I have another image here that's in the same ratio. It's another landscape style image. Let's go and use the last style that we just created. Now this one does have a locked background, so I'm going to click on the "Lock" to unlock it. Then I'll choose "Window" and then "Styles" because I need to get access to the style that I just created. The copies space style is at the very bottom here. I'll click on it once and it's applied automatically to this image. This would be useful, for example, if you're preparing a document and you wanted all your images to have this copy space applied to them. Creating it as a last image that it's instantaneously able to be applied to additional images. 8. Pt 7 Polaroid Edge Effect: In the last video, we saw how we could create a copy space Layer style. This time I want to create one that is a little bit more like a Polaroid image. Let's see how we do that. I'll click on the "Layers" and I'm going to unlock this layer because we need to unlock it to be able to apply a style to it. I'll click the "Fx" icon and I'm going to choose "Stroke". Now, I wanted to have a white stroke list, let just reset it to the default so you can see what yours is probably going to look like. I'll click here on "Color" and set it to white. I wanted to have a fair bit of thickness, so I'm going to adjust up the size. At the moment it's on the inside. Now, I just want to show you a problem which might occur with these strokes. In fact, I'm going to make it a little bit thicker for now and let's just click "Okay". I'm going to add a new layer. You don't need to do this. I just want to show you the problem that I want to avoid. I'm going to add a field element on this layer and I'm going to move this stroke onto that filled elements so we can set in place. This is what the inside stroke looks like. But let me double click on this and I want to set it to center. When you set it to center your say that you'd get these round edges which are not as desirable. When you're making a choice, just make sure it's going to work in all circumstances. If this image was not taking up the whole of the artboard and if you chose center as a position because it looked all right when you first created the last style, you'll see that it's probably not going to look all right, when you come to use it on an image that's not taking up the whole of the artboard. Let me just go back to inside because that's a much better option. I'm going to pull this back onto the layer that we were working on. Looks just fine here and let me just trash that layer that I used for an example. Now a Polaroid image has a thicker area at the bottom, but you can't add uneven borders in layers style, so you can't use the stroke effect to create an uneven border. But we already know from our previous video how we can get a white border down the bottom and we do it with a gradient. With this layer selected, let's go back, click the "Fx" icon and let's choose "Gradient Overlay". We're going to reset this to the default, start over a fresh. We wanted to make sure that we're working with the same color as we're using around the border. In my case, it's white, so I'm going to double-click here and set this to white. I want just the bottom part of this image to be covered with the gradient. I want this end to be zero opacity, so I'm going to set it to zero opacity and then I'm going to make a duplicate of this zero opacity and bring it all the way to about here. Then I need to create this harsh edge. I do that by selecting my 100 percent opacity, stop here and click again to make a duplicate of it. Then I'm just going to put the two in the exact same position, keeping an eye on the gradient bar to make sure that it's looking the way I want it to look which it is right now. Well, it's not quite in the right position. Let me see if I can get it and a little more accurate. There we are. We've got their hard edge that we were looking for. I'll click "Okay" and then "Okay" again. This is a Polaroid look. It's done with two layer styles, so stroked to get the outside edge and then a gradient layer style with a hard edge built into it to build up the bottom part of our Polaroid look. I'll double-click here. I'm going to save this as a new style. I'm going to call this Polaroid edge. Let's go back to another image. This image is in those same sorts of proportions. I'll unlock it because I need to unlock the background layer before I can apply a style to it, choose Window and then styles at the very end of my styles. This will be my Polaroid edge. I'll click it to add it to this image. Now, it looks right now as if it's been spectacularly unsuccessful and that is because of the width of the stroke. I can change that, so I'll open up the layer. I'll right-click this and choose "Scale Effects". I'm going bring down the scale of this effect. I'm going to take it down to about 50 percent, still a little bit too big on that strokes so let's take it to say 30. I'll click "Okay". This is our Polaroid edge which has now been adjusted to fit this additional image. We can also apply it to one of the other images that we were working on. I'll just trash this particular layer style and let's go and apply the Polaroid image look. This is applicable to a landscape image as it is to a square image or a portrait image. It's very easily added to your images by just selecting the "Image Layer" and applying it from the "Styles Dialogue". In this way, you could create a range of edge effects that were easily added to images with just a single click. 9. Pt 8 Black and White and Tints with Layer Styles: In addition to adding things like borders and that copies space gradient element to your photographs that we looked at in the last couple of videos, it's also possible to create a black and white image using a layer style. Let's see how we do that with this portion of the image that we were working with earlier. I've got the layer unlocked, so if it was locked, you'll need to unlock it before you start. I'll go down here to the "fx" icon, and I'll choose "Color Overlay". Now the default color overlay here is just a gray and it's set to 100 percent opacity. To make our image black and white we just change the blend mode here. I'm going to drag it down all the way to the end here to saturation, and this makes the image black and white. It doesn't matter whether you use white or black or a shade of gray here for your color overlay. Any of those colors is going to give you the exact same effect. What we're doing is just converting the image to black and white, so you can use black, white, or a shade of gray. Now because in the most recent versions of Photoshop, we can add multiple of some of these layer styles. Let's add another color overlay. I'll go to the "fx" icon and click "Color Overlay". This one I'm going to put on the top here, and I'm going to set it to a different color. I'm going to use the color to blend in with the black and white if you like. I'm going to use this as a sepia tone and let's go and get a yellow here. For the blend mode, well, I suggest that you use color burn, it's just a really nice blend mode, but you could try any of these. Let's go to "Dissolve" and let's just travel down the blend mode list, this is multiply, I did not liking the effect nearly as much as I like color burn on this particular image. But your mileage might differ. You might get different results with different images. When we reach the blend modes there in this group where contrast is important, you may also find a blend mode that works is as overlay, soft light kind of cool, hard light, down to pin light. You may want to experiment and see what you can achieve using some of these blend modes. But for me, I'm going back to color burn, with I really like that with this image. I'll just click "Okay". This is a black and white colorized effect that we can then save and reuse on any image at anytime. Now you might be wondering if you can combine layer style. We've got this layer style that's turning our image into black and white, and adding a slight colorization to it. But what if we wanted to give it that polaroid border? Well, let's go to "Window" and then "Styles", and here is our polaroid edge here. I'll click on it, but unfortunately what it's doing is replacing the previous layer style. Let's choose "Edit" and then "Undo Apply Style" to just reverse that. I'm going to hold down the "Shift" key, and this time I'll click on "Polaroid Edge". In this case, it's added to the image effect, not replacing it. Holding the "Shift" key will allow you to stack layer styles onto an image. But of course that's going to rely on you using the layer styles that you can combine. There are some layer styles that you can't have multiples of, but there are some that you can. In this case, we're able to stack these styles. But you'll see that stroke has gone to the top and gradients gone to the bottom. There is a stacking order for these styles and you can't change that stacking order. It's implicit in how these layer styles are created. 10. Project and wrapup: We've now finished the video component for this course, and so it's over to you to practice what you've learned. Your class project will be to either create a layer style of your own and apply it to some text or a graphic shape or download the layer style from the Internet, install it, and use it on either a shape or a piece of text. Post an image of your completed work as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about layer styles in Photoshop. Now, as you were watching these videos you would have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others, please, if you did enjoy the class, would you complete the online survey as this really helps other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, then click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. As always, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.