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Layer Effects and Styles

Lesson 23 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

23. Layer Effects and Styles

Learn how to use Layer Effects and Layer Styles to create interesting looks. This is a continuation of the “Groovy 3” exercise.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Layer Effects and Styles

let's keep exploring the layers palette. Now we're gonna look at layer effects and styles. And so we have a groovy three here and what we want to do is go back to the original 123 PSD file and we can do that by going to our history palette and selecting the top most thing or there's some, there's a new way, but I want to show you how to go all the way back to the start if you just totally messed things up and that is to go to file revert. And so this is like the last ditch emergency exercise if you want to say undo every single thing I've done and go back to the beginning, that's what revert does, that's what we want to do. So I'm gonna click revert and this takes us all the way back to the very beginning of the last saved state of this file. So that is where we are right now. We've gone all the way back to the beginning, it's sort of the the equivalent of closing the file and opening it up again, just getting rid of everything that you've done. Okay? So what we want to do is do someth...

ing that's similar to our Groovy three, but we're gonna start talking about layer effects and styles and what those are. So again, we want to go in and we're gonna duplicate some of the work that we did before. We're gonna turn off the one um layer right here, we're gonna turn off the two layer here, We're gonna work on layer three and only layer three. And so let's once again go over and get our magic wand tool, select the red here on the three. And then we're going to delete that and then deselect. And so we're back to where we were earlier. Now we're gonna do something a little bit different, we're going to go onto the layers palette over here in the lower right hand corner and you'll see that there are a bunch of different little icons here. Now one of them is a little plus icon and that is to allow us to add a new layer. We want to add a new layer. So we're gonna go in here, we're gonna click on that, it's by default it's named layer one, double click that and we are going to rename that white, we've renamed our layer white. Now, what we want to do is we want to make sure that we have a white foreground color and so again we can hit D. That gives us our default colors so you can see the foreground color by default is black and the background color is white. We need to swap those by hitting X. Now we have white as our foreground color. Now let's use the tool we haven't used before, the paint bucket tool so go over here about halfway down, you can see that we have the paint bucket tool, get that and then go over here on the white layer, make sure you've selected the white layer and then click and we've just dumped white into that layer, which is pretty cool. Now what we can do is we can go over to our layers palette and drag white below the three layer. And now we have three on a white background instead of the red background that we had. All right, that's pretty cool. Now what we want to do is change the look of the three so we're not gonna be kindergartners and do groovy three this time we're gonna add some layer, styles and effects. So to do that, Make sure you have the three layer selected. And then down at the lower right hand corner. These little icons here, one of them says fx Those are the effects. So click on that and then you'll see a bunch of different effects that we can add to this, we can add a shadow, we can do a color overlay, we can do a drop shadow but we want to do something even more spectacular. So click on blending options. Now, as soon as you do that, you get this thing here that says blending options. We don't really care about the blending options. What we do care about is the thing right above that click on styles now we have a bunch of styles that are built into Photoshop, we have to click our explore our triangles here, disclosure triangles to see these different um layer styles. So I'm just going to drag this sort of over here and I'll see if I can Yeah, I moved that out of the way a little bit and just sort of click on any of these styles and you're going to see that your three changes based on the style that you select. So go ahead and play with those and see what you get. And we're going to do that until we get exactly what we want and it doesn't matter. You can do exactly what you want if you also want to you can go over here to these different blending options and things and you can play with these uh these different things over here, the drop shadows and all that kind of stuff to sort of see what they do take some time to play with this layer style palette, you can turn things on and off. You can see how that changes the different styles here, you can take the styles away, you can add a drop shadow, do what you want, you're gonna have fun playing with this once you have it selected, click OK. And now you can see that you have some effects that have been applied to your three that are non destructive, you can go over here and turn on and off different things in your layers palette depending on what you want. So if you don't want that drop shadow, you can just get rid of it and you can go and change those as you wish. And so it's a non destructive way to add some style to your layer. Okay? Now that we know about that, what we want to do next is we want to revisit something we did earlier, and that is layer masks using Karen on beans. And so we're gonna take Karen on beans to the next level. So let's get ready and do that next.

Class Materials

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Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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