Photoshop Tutorials - Layer Effects

Layer Effects

In this tutorial lets take a look at the basic layer effects and blending options.

You can right click on any layer and choose Blending Options to bring up the mondo dialog box.

You can also go to the lower left icon on the bottom of the layers palette to specifically choose which effect that you want to apply immediately. Default settings will automatically be applied.

Here I’m choosing drop shadow from the menu. Instantly the default drop shadow is applied to the layer (the text layer).

You can go ahead and get comfortable with the different settings. In this image you can see how to change the distance of the drop shadow.

You can also change the size and spread of the shadow with the slider bars or entering a numerical value. Increasing the size will start blurring or fuzzing the shadow out.

Here you can see the difference the distance setting makes. The angle is very important in the settings. You can manually move the angle in the circle bar, enter a numerical value or....

..you can even drag the shadow around outside of the dialog box to where you want it. Try it!

When the ‘Use global light’ setting is on, the angle you change to will affect all other layers layer effects to match that angle. De-click this box if you want to adjust the drop shadow effect independently of anything else going on (recommended).

Press OK when you are satisfied.

 

Now you can see in the layers palette under the layer is the layer effect which has its own property.

You can turn on and off the visibility or ‘effect’ of the layer effect with the seeing eyeball icon as shown.

Click the arrow to hide any layer effects and conserve space.

You can double click on the layer effect itself in the palette to bring up the dialog box settings for a particular effect.

Much ado has been made about the difference between fill and opacity. It’s really quite simple. When you have layer effects (drop shadow, outer glow, etc.) and lower the ‘fill’, the actual text color will fade while the layer effects remain at 100%.  As you can see an example here, you might often want to just lower the fill to retain the layer effects only or mostly.

When you lower the opacity of a layer you are also lowering the opacity of the layer effects (regardless if they are there or not). Opacity is the master tool and Fill retains any layer effects.

Remember that you can doubleclick on the text layer icon to highlight the text editing field. You can also use the ‘T’ tool and move it around to any point along there and enter back into the editing field by clicking.

Posted in: Photoshop Tutorials