From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Type Essentials

Type and layer effects - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Type Essentials

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Type and layer effects

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- [Instructor] This is a quick overview of the kind of effects that you can apply non-destructively with layer styles. So layer styles are all added here from this drop down at the bottom of the layers panel. Once applied they will be listed beneath the layer, they can be turned on and off and they can be edited if you just double click on the layer style or double click to the right of the layer name. In this first example I have a stroke and a drop shadow applied. I'm just going to move my layer slightly to the left so that when I go to the layer style dialog box we can still see the type. I should mention also that you can have multiples of some of these, those that have plus symbols next to them allow you to apply multiple iterations of that particular layer style. Now in the case of the drop shadow, what's nice about this is that as well as determining the angle and the distance here numerically with the sliders, you can just move onto the canvas and you can drag the shadow into position. If you want to soften the shadow then you can increase its size. And the shadow will update if I were to edit the type. The stroke can be applied to the outside, inside or center of the shape. So with type it's preferable to apply the stroke to the outside so that it doesn't change the letter shapes. If I change the position to the inside and then increase the size of the stroke, you can see how the letter shapes are now being distorted. Let me now turn off that example and I'll turn on this group. So this example contains two layers which have different effects applied to them. Let's turn off the top one, and we see that this layer has a pattern overlay which is applying this shading. Let's go and take a look at that. With a pattern overlay, you can choose from one of these predefined patterns, you have lots more predefined patterns that you can load. You can change the scale of the pattern, and the blending mode and opacity. So I'm going to stick with this as is. For this particular effect in addition, and this is something that you can do with all of the effects, but I think it works well with patterns, is I've come to my blending options and I've actually turned down the fill opacity to zero. I put that back up, you can see that's how it would look with a fill opacity of 100. With the pattern combining with the color of the type, but all I want to see in this case is the pattern. Now in addition to that, I also have a drop shadow. On top of this layer I have a second layer to which is applied a stroke, an inner shadow, and the inner shadow is another of those layer effects that you can drag into position as well as use the sliders. And I also have a gradient overlay which we saw in the previous movie. I'll close that, and then we have one more example. And I just want to use this to make the point and this is similar to the technique that we saw with the pattern, that here with the bevel and emboss, a bevel and emboss simultaneously applies a highlight in a lightening screen blending mode and a shadow in a darkening screen blending mode. Now to create this metallic look, I have changed the gloss contour. The gloss contour, the default is this option, but we have these others to choose from. And crucially for this technique once again from the blending options, I have reduced the fill opacity to zero so that all we are seeing are the effects, I'm not seeing any interaction with the original colors of the layer. So those are just a few of the many, many techniques that you can accomplish using layer styles. And I have a course all about layer styles here in the library.

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