Lessons

Lesson Info

Layer Styles

When I work with taxed and when I work with shapes if I want to just make it look a little bit more interesting I will often incorporate later styles so let's take a brief look at some ideas with layer styles you can do all sorts of things with them this is going to be by no means extensive I just want to make sure you understand a few basic concepts with them and a few ways to extend the way they work but I have remembered how you if you make a layer style before we added a drop shadow and a stroke around a panel lodge I think it was and we saved in the styles panel so we get it back well I have a bunch of them saved in here from a bunch of different things have done over the years and if I click on these you can see some of the various effects we can create with these some of these even come with photo shop but I just want to make sure that you understand a few interesting qualities of layer styles what we can do with him that one seemed to be the most interesting looking one out of ...

these I have some others up here though that have weird textures in them all sorts of things and if you want to see an example of where I used those petite particular features um I should have here they are a few examples, so creating things like user interfaces. Sometimes people like it to look like a physical object. This is very simple it's a circle on one layer. That circle has a drop shadow underneath it. It has a bevel in boss which is what's adding the highlight on this side and the shadow on this side and it has a pattern filled into it. And on a different seminar. I think I showed you how to make brushed metal. If you have been following the photo shop mastery serious, but all brushed metal is is add noise and then motion blur. It looks like brush now that could either be incorporated into the style itself or if you don't know how to make a repeating pattern so that it could be incorporated like that, it could instead be applied the same way we applied a photo inside of the text. We put it on the layer directly above this shape, and then you go to the later menu there's a choice of create clipping mask in that would cause thie brush metal being there. On top of that, this is the polygon tool, the same tool we use to make a tooth on the gear. That's just applied right on top of it and it also has a bevel it in boss applied to it which is what's making it have this little sheen to it on some edges, and that little edge in the two pop together suddenly looks like a little bolt. You know it's just to shape sitting on top of each other, it's the layer styles to give it some of that more realism in look, other examples remember we made that gear and how it was made out of those individual pieces. Well, here is that gear with some layer style supplied to it and it just a few other layers those layers thie other ones are overly simple. They're just circles that they're applied in all of the look in here that is anything other than a solid color is completely applied using layer styles. This is the brushed metal kind of look, which is add noise and motion blur to create it. This is a shape here that happens to have a circle taken out of it remember how with shaped tool you can tell it to add to the shape we're takeaway from tell it to take away from and you can do that it happens to have a drop shadow underneath it you khun sheet see that drop shadow through here falling on what's underneath it has a bevel in and boss on it which is what's creating this edge right around here the devil in boss you got to play with the settings in there is the gear see the gear it's got a texture in it you see those little bars they look almost like metal bars you're probably dang how the heck can you create metal bars and metal bars are easy I don't know if I'll create that exact texture because I I don't have it written down but I will just make something that gives you the essence of how that was done I will often create textures and I'll share with you just one method for creating something that is a repeating texture where it's relatively obviously it's repeating uh I'm going to choose a light shade of grey looking my foreground color uh light shade of gray and I'm just going to fill this layer with that light shade of grey by going to the edit menu choosing phil and then I'll just tell it to fill with my foreground color they're also keyboard shark it's for that then yeah here's a filter filter uh I think it's under pixelated color half tone you know color half tones how you print in a magazine or newspaper in a little dots you used to scene and if I choose filter pixelated color half tone this will come up and the number I type it on the top is how big the circle should be and then these are the angles usually for science, magenta, yellow and black. If you're in c m y k mode but I want just black circles and to do that, you said all these settings identical, you just make a match. Forty five degrees is the default when it comes to reproducing an image, if you have a black ink black, white picture, uh, but the number up here determines how big they're gonna be let's, see what twelve gives us? All right? If I wanted him bigger, I choose, undo and set a typing in twelve typing something bigger. We want a smaller I choose undo and I type in something smaller. The reason why we get all these circles is what is doing this is trying to reproduce this shade of gray is if you did it in a newspaper where all you can use his little black dots to do it with. So what happens is the darker the shade of grey you have the bigger, the more how would I call it closer together? The circles are the close of the art of touching each other with lighter than the shade of gray. The more of a gap there is in between them because to reproduce a really light shade of grey, you use tiny little dots that are really far apart from each other to reproduce a dark shade of gray used big dots that are almost overlapping each other and so the shade of grey that's in here is determining how much space there is between things so filter pixel eight color half tone put all these sort of the same I usually use forty five and then up here this determines how big so if I type in four get a bunch of little dots choose undo if I come in here color half tone type in twenty big circles but the space between them should be relatively the same you know? So anyway have that now I'm going to take that and I'm just going to do in motion blur and when we typed in the angle we typed in forty five didn't just goingto bring this up until they start combining that there may be so we're starting to get the the basis of those little bars that you saw okay and then I'm just going to experiment with filters I don't know what filter about to choose I'm going to go to filter gallery and I'm just going to say, well what would that look like? No ooh that's gonna interesting but just by spending about a minute what was that one poster edges that look like kind of interesting bars experiment with setting see if you can get even more interesting but possibly poster edges so it looks like we already have plastic wrap from some previous applications I could turn that off who all right let's say that some bars and there or maybe I put the plastic wrap on top there get plastic wrap on top of poster edges all right, you getting some bars now I could turn this into a seamless pattern there's a couple different ways of doing so but I would use the center portion because that looks like where it's seamless it seems to start to very once it gets out to the edge is um but all I did is when I do this kind of stuff honestly back when I created a bunch of patterns that were overly complex and things I watched bad television usually it was the usa network they might have improved by now I stop watching tv a long time ago but I would turn on some some program it would only entertain me for about five minutes and then I pop over to photo shop and play with it a little bit playing with these filters and then my brain will start going oh, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do next and I'd look back to the tv until my brain calm down and then I looked back to here and if I do that for a couple hours I can end up creating dozens and dozens of textures that I can use for years and years after that and so this just happens to be similar to how I created the texture that is in here what do you do now that you don't watch tv already have the textures I made him a long time things over and over again yeah so so anyway that's similar to what's inside here you get the essence for how some of that was made it looks a little shiny in here that's either a bevel in boss or one of the other layer styles that's just adding a little bit of a sheen on it we can open the file see what isthe um here's another alternative to it same file just different layer styles so it's hide that let's figure out which of these layers has thie okay it's that one okay let's figure out what here's the pattern overlays without the pattern let's turn off the other stuff so there's just the here we can hide okay there it is that's the pattern overlay which is created with half tone motion blur in that experiment until you find something that gives you that look uh then I put it grady in't overlay that made one end darker than the opposite end. If you usually do great in overlay though it completely covers up what's there in order to get it to look this way ingredient overlay use a blending mode I happen to use soft light here but experiment uh then on top of that is an inner shadow that's what gave it its sense of being recessed and then there is a bevel on him boss that's what gave it its gloss and the on ly riel odd thing about my beveling and blas is if I double click on it to show you the settings I experimented but the main thing is there's something called a glass contour that very few people play with and the default setting is this one which makes it look more normal and so I clicked on this just click on the very first one and you khun arrow through these so I would arrow, arrow, arrow some of those made it look really shiny like glossy you're almost likely we're looking through glass at her and so I just experienced I had no idea what it's going to get when I played with them and I was able to get that so you throw in the background that's the gear just like the one we made it just the teeth or further apart right that's brush medal which is motion scrub ad nos motion blur what the heck is that? Well, look at the stiles I played it's a drop shadow drop shadow and outer glow this little it's a dark our outer glow grady in't overlay this makes the top part darker satin puts little squiggle in the middle stroke around the edge and then bevel in boston's, most of it on a bench in bevel nimbus. I played with that same thing until I found the interesting one, but you get the idea that you could start with a simple shape and it's a matter of spending time with the layer styles in order to get something interesting. Once you get something interesting, do not close that file. Save it in the styles panel so you could get to it later. So once you have a layer that has something interesting effect, click right up here in the styles panel. Save it as a style, spend a day watching bad television and experimenting end up with thirty or forty styles that you can use for the rest of your life and you've only wasted you know a certain amount of time and or do a search on google photoshopped layer styles free and see what comes up and you get some other layer styles from other people. But it should be something where your designs can be a little bit more interesting if you are not afraid to go into their experiment.