Merging and saving layer styles

In this movie I'll show you how to merge multiple styles together, and then I'll show you how to save out your own collection of styles, whether you want to move them to a different machine or a different platform or share them with another person or even just back them up. So here I am looking at that play effect that I created a couple of movies back, and you can see, if you look at the layers panel, that the style comprises three layer effects. Bevel & Emboss, Pattern Overlay and Drop Shadow. Stroke is turned off. But let's say I decide to select a different style, for example, I'll go ahead and click on Green Gradient with Stroke, which is included along with the Text Effects collection that ships with Photoshop.

Notice this time we get just two style Stroke is now turned on and Gradient Overlay. So in other words, there is no overlap, and if I were to click on the style I created, which is My toy, then you'll see that the stroke effect because it was turned off, was not even saved. So there is absolutely no overlap between these styles at all and yet they go ahead and replace each other. So clicking on a style deletes all effects from a layer and replaces those effects with new ones. What if you want to combine these effects together? Well, in that case, you go ahead and press the Shift key and click on a style, and now we've got Bevel & Emboss, Stroke, Gradient Overlay, Pattern Overlay, and Drop Shadow.

Now incidentally, if there had been any overlay in layer effects, the style that you click on wins. So if Green Gradient with Stroke had included a Bevel & Emboss effect, then you will replace the Bevel & Emboss effect, whether you press the Shift key or not. All right now let's make a few modifications. Currently, even though we have both Gradient Overlay and Pattern Overlay, Gradient Overlay is altogether covering up the pattern because it's set to 100% Opacity and the Normal Blend mode. So go and turn it back on, and then double-click on it, and let's swap out its Blend mode so we get some interaction here.

I'll change the Blend mode from Normal to Hue, which allows the saturation and luminance information from the pattern below to show through. So I'll choose that function, and you can see that we get an interesting interaction. Now I want to modify the Stroke. It just seems like we are getting awful close to a Christmas effect here, and that's not what I am looking for. So I'll click on the Stroke item, and you can see what's going on is it's a tight Gradient there. So it goes black to red to black again. And the Style is set to Shape Burst, so that it traces around the letters.

So the first thing I am going to do is click on this Gradient bar in order to modify the gradient, and I'm going to click very carefully on this black color swatch because they are right next to each other, they are only a percentage point away, and you should see a location of 81%, then press Shift+up arrow in order to scoot that Color Stop to the right. Now click on red Color Stop, and then click on this color bar right there in order to bring up the Color Picker dialog box and just change the Hue value, nothing else, to 50 degrees, and then click OK, and now I'll press Shift+up arrow for it in order to move it to a Location of 90.

Now very carefully select this red Color Stop. So when I say very carefully, I mean click on the far right edge of it, so you don't get the black Color Stop. Then click on its red bar there, and we'll change it to a Hue value of 50 degrees as well, and then I'll press Shift+up arrow twice in order to change the Location to 53%, and now I'll click on the black color swatch, and I'll press Shift+up arrow twice to change it to a location of 52%. Now I'll click OK. The next thing I want to do is back off the Size value because notice when the Size value gets sufficiently large here, we start to get these polygonal transitions and they are showing up at 20 pixels as well.

So I am going to take that value down to 10 pixels there, and then finally, I want to drop those blacks out and just keep the yellows. So I am going to change the Blend mode from Normal to Screen which treats black as invisible, and that way the strokes are just sort of sitting out here in space. All right now click OK in order to accept that effect, and of course, by all means we should go ahead and save this as a style. I'm out of empty room, actually I do have some on the right-hand side here. So I'll just go ahead and click there, or I could click on the little page icon, and I'll go ahead and call this style, Green toy, and notice that Include Layer Blending options is turned off because, again, there aren't any, so no reason to save them, and I'll go ahead and click OK in order to create that New Style.

All right, now let's save out the New Styles that we've created over the course of these last three movies. And there is a couple of ways to do that, one is to go up to the Styles panel flyout menu and choose the Save Styles command, but that's going to save all of the styles, including those Adobe styles as well, and you probably don't want to do that. The alternative is if you didn't want to save all the Adobe styles, you could delete them all by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, and clicking on each one of them. And notice when you press Alt, or Option, your cursor changes to a pair of scissors.

But I don't really recommend you do that either. So here is the best approach. Go to the Edit menu choose Presets and choose Preset Manager. This is a kind of hidden command actually that's very, very useful. Now what it allows you to do is save any presets that you've created across the board as an independent file, so that you can load them up either later or elsewhere. So we've got Brushes and Swatches and Gradients, and then next is Styles. I'll go ahead and choose Styles, and now I can see all the styles they have currently loaded, and four of them are styles I just got done creating.

There's My chalk, there is also My toy, and then these last two Tarnish, and then Green toy. So let's say that I want to select them and move them together. So I would go ahead and click on My chalk, Shift-click on My toy, and then Ctrl-click, or command-click, on Tarnish because it's not adjacent to the others. If I Shift clicked I'd select a range of the styles, and then go ahead and Ctrl-click, or command-click, on Green toy. And what you want to do is just kind of drag them around, I'll drag these guys over to this location, and now all four of them are in a row, and I'll click on the first one, and then Shift-click on the last one in order to select that full range, and now I can just save those selected items as a set.

So I'll click the Save Set button, and I'll call these guys something like, My new styles, and that way they are safe and protected, and I can come back to them anytime I like. Once you are finished organizing your styles and saving them, then go ahead and click the Done button in order to return to your image. All right. I'll Shift+Tab away my panels. And that, folks, is how you merge and save layer styles here inside Photoshop.