From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Applying layer effects and styles - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Applying layer effects and styles

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- [Narrator] Photoshop has a number of built-in, non-destructive effects, including drop shadows and overlays, glows and strokes, which can be applied to a variety of different kinds of layers. I want to start by adding a drop shadow to image one. I can either choose the layer menu and then layer style and drop shadow, or we can use the effects icon at the bottom of the layers panel in order to add a drop shadow. Now to make sure that we're all starting with the same settings, I'll choose reset to default. To change the drop shadow, we can use the distance as well as the angle slider, or we can simply click and drag in the image area in order to reposition it. Let's go ahead and just zoom in a bit to make sure that we can see this. We can also change the blend mode. It's set to multiply by default, as well as the color and the opacity of the drop shadow. In order to soften the edge, I'll use the size slider, and then we'll just reposition it a little bit closer to the image. We can add multiple layer effects to a single image. Here, I'll add a stroke. Now there's a difference between clicking in this empty well and actually selecting the stroke so that you can see all of the options. Here, I'm going to add a 10 pixel stroke, and I'm going to add it to the outside of the image. I'll click in the color swatch and I'll change the color to black. Now, all of the layer effects that have the plus icon on them can be added multiple times. I'll click on plus, and now let's add a little bit smaller of a stroke, and I'll change the color by just sampling something in the image. When we apply the style, we can see the effects icon in the layers panel, as well as the chevron to hide or show the effects. We can toggle the visibility of all of the effects or of the single effects, and if we wanted to delete all of the effects, we could drag the effects down to the trash. I'll go ahead and undo that, or we can drag a single effect to the trash. Now, if you want to edit the layer style, we can double click on the word effects or on any of the effects, and that'll bring up the layer styles dialogue. I'm just going to increase the amount of both of these strokes. So I'll set the first one to 10 and this one to 20. Let's also just change the color of this one. I'll click in the color swatch and let's make it red just to make sure that it's visible. If I think I'm going to use this style over and over again, I can click in the styles area and then choose new style. I'll just call this JK, and we want to include the layer effects. Then we can apply that and if we look at the styles panel, our style has been added. This makes it very easy to drag the style onto another layer, even if that layer is not selected. All right, let me zoom out and let's talk about applying styles to multiple layers. As I just showed, we can drag and drop a style, or we could right click and we could copy a layer style, select another layer, and then paste a layer style. We can also drag and drop styles between layers. Now, if I just drag it to another layer, it's going to move it. If I hold down the option key or the alt key on Windows, then we can drag and drop it and it would copy it. Now, it's important to note that layer effects on different layers are not linked. So if I double click on this layer effect and I change the color to green, it's only going to affect the layer style on that layer. If you have a number of layers and you want to apply a single style to all of those layers, instead of applying them to each individual layer, it might be easier to select those layers and then I'm going to clear the layer style, and instead I'm going to put all of these layers into a group. Once they're all into a group, then I can right click on group one and I can paste that layer style. This can be much more convenient because if I have to make a change to one of these styles, like the stroke. In this case, I'll just change it back to gray. Well, because it's applying to all of the layers in the group, I only have to change it once. The only disadvantage is if your layers overlap. So I'll select the move tool, and I'll just reposition this layer and let's just zoom in. When you add a style to a group, Photoshop treats all of the content in the group as if the layers have been merged together. So instead of seeing the stroke outside of each individual circle, it's as if they've been flattened, and we're only going to get it on the outside of the combination of the shapes. So as long as we save this file as a layered PSD file or a TIF file, we can re-edit any of the layer effects or styles at any time.

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