From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

Creating, saving, and applying layer styles - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

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Creating, saving, and applying layer styles

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- [Instructor] Learning the different ways to apply layer styles can make us much more productive when we need to apply layer styles across multiple layers, as well as multiple documents. As we can see in the styles panel there are a number of different default layer styles. I'll go ahead and select the gate layer and then just click on a few of these so we can see the range of styles that we can create using the layer styles in Photoshop. All right, let's go ahead and delete those. I can click on the effects and just drag them to the trash. We're going to do something a little bit more simple. I want to add a drop shadow as well as change the color for all of these layers. I'll use the effects icon at the bottom of the layers panel in order to add a drop shadow I can always reset the drop shadow to its default at a starting place and then we can change any of the options. So I'll make it a little bit more opaque. I'll also make it a little bit larger and I'll change the angle to about maybe 130. Then I also want to add a color overlay. So I'll select that. Again, resetting it to its defaults, and then clicking on the color swatch and choosing a color from the image. I'll just darken that down a bit, click okay. And if this was something that I used over and over again I could actually make this the default setting for the color overlay but if I use this combination of color overlay plus the drop shadow, and I might want to apply it to multiple layers in a single document or across documents, then I will save them both as a style. Clicking styles I'll click on the new style. I'll just name this GGB for Golden Gate Bridge and I'll include the layer effects. We didn't include any layer blending options, which are found under this area here and for now I won't add it to my current library, but if you want to know more about libraries, there'll be covered in a later chapter on libraries. Once I click okay and okay again, we can see that that style has been added to the styles panel. In order to move it into a group that I created by just clicking the group icon, I can drag and drop it. So if I just need to move a layer style from one layer to another, I can just drag on the word effects in order to move the entire effects meaning the color overlay and the drop shadow. If I just want to move a portion of the style or a single layer effect I can just click and drag that effect. All right, I'll use command Z to undo that. And if I want to make a duplicate of the effect, then I'll hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows and drag that to another layer. So that's a great way if you have just created a layer effect and you know that you're really only going to need it in this single document, but you need it applied to multiple layers. To take that one step further, if I have several layers in a single document that I want to apply it to, I can select any of the layers that have the effect. Right, click and choose to copy the layer style then select all of the other layers that I want to apply it to and right click and choose to paste the layer style. Again this is a great option if you've created a layer effect but you're probably not going to use it in the future. So you may not want to save it as a style, but just apply it to multiple layers in a single document. It's important to note that if I make a change to one of these layers, I'll double click on color overlay, and then just change the color to blue. When I update this layer style it has nothing to do with the other layers nor with the style that I've saved. Now, because we've saved this as a style, If I need to apply it to multiple layers in this document or in multiple layers to another document either today or tomorrow or next week it will just be sitting here waiting to be used in my styles panel. So if I click on it, it will update that layer. If I want to remove a layer style or a portion of the layer style, I can either click and drag on the portion that I want to delete or I can click effects and delete the entire layer style or I could select a layer right, click and choose clear layer style. For now I'll select both the gate and the San Francisco layer and just click the layer style to apply it again. So when you're just working with a single document that has multiple layers it might be easier to hold the option key and make copies by dragging and dropping them between layers or right clicking and copying and pasting the layer styles. But if you're going to use the layer style again and want to be able to access it quickly in the future, be sure to save it as a layer style so you can use it again later.

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