From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

Creating, saving, and applying layer styles - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

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Creating, saving, and applying layer styles

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- [Instructor] Learning the different ways to apply Layer Styles can make us much more productive when we're applying Layer Styles across multiple layers and documents. I have the Styles preset panel showing and there's a number of default styles that you can use. I'm going to select the Bridge layer here, it's not actually a type layer, it's a shape layer, and then just look at some of the different Fur styles. So as you can see, you can do a lot with styles. I'll move to Fabric and go down to the Fabric styles. We can also take a look at some of these Natural styles. So when you have a few minutes be sure to check out all of the different presets, in fact, you can use the fly-out menu and load Legacy Styles and More to access a whole bunch more additional styles. But for now let's go ahead and take that off. I'll click and drag the Effects into the trash. Now all I want to do is add a very simple style here, so from the bottom of the Layers panel I'll click on the Effects icon and I want to add a Drop Shadow. I'm going to reset the Drop Shadow to its default and then just increase the Opacity of the Drop Shadow a little bit. Then I can change the Angle of the Drop Shadow, as well as the Distance. Or I can just click in the image area to change both the Angle and the Distance at one time. I'll decrease the Size a little bit, making it little bit of a harder edge Drop Shadow. And again, just reposition that. Now I also want to add a Color Overlay. There's a difference between clicking in the empty well here. That will add the Color Overlay, but it doesn't give me the options to the right. So I'll click Color Overlay and now I can pick whatever color I want. I'll click on the swatch, that brings up the Color Picker where I could select a color or I can click and drag with the eyedropper in the image area. Let's go ahead and pick one that's a little bit darker than that. OK, I'll click OK and now we have two different layer effects applied and I want to save them as a Layer Style. There's a number of different ways you can do that. We can go to the Styles area here and then I could click on New Style. But I'd like to create a group to put the style in and you can't create a group from this dialog. So I'll click OK and because that layer effect has been applied to the Bridge layer I can go to the Styles panel, create a new group, I'll call it jk styles, and then making sure that it is targeted I'll click on the plus icon and that will add my style. I'll call it GGB for Golden Gate Bridge and choose whether or not to include the Layer Effects, well, yes, that's the Color Overlay and Drop Shadow. I can include layer blending options. I didn't actually change any of those, so I don't need to do that. And I can also choose to add it to my current library. Now we haven't talked much about libraries, but libraries are a great way if you need to collaborate with other people or if you use Photoshop on multiple computers, because whatever you store in the libraries are stored in the cloud. We'll talk about that more in the libraries chapter. For now I'll click OK and we can see that that style's been created, but it wasn't put directly into my group, so I'll drag and drop it inside of that. Now if I wanted to move this style from one layer to another I could click and drag on the word Effects and just drop it onto another layer. If I hold down the Option key and I drag and drop it then Photoshop is going to make a copy of it. If I only want to copy part of a style to another layer I can click directly on the part of the style or the effect that I want to copy, hold down the Option key, and then drag and drop it. If I want to apply the same style to multiple layers I just select all of the layers in the Layers panel and then click on the style. By default when you add a style it's going to open the disclosure triangle, so that you can see that style. You can actually change that preference using the Layers panel's fly-out menu here under Panel Options you can tell it to not expand the new effect. I'll leave it on for now though, because you can also just Option + click right on that disclosure triangle in order to close all of the styles at one time. One thing to notice is if you do make a change to one of the styles, for example, if I double-click on Color Overlay, click on the color swatch, and then change the color, maybe to a dark blue instead, when I click OK and OK again that style doesn't get updated on the other layers. In order to do that I could right-click and I could say Copy the Layer Style, that copies it to the clipboard, I could then select the other layers and choose to Paste the Layer Style. However, if I thought that I was going to use this again and again I would select one layer, click the plus icon, we'll call this Golden Gate Bridge, but blue, click OK, and now it's been added to my Styles panel. So all I'd need to do is select all those layers and click on the different style. If I ever want to clear a style select the layer, right-click, and then choose Clear Layer Style. So there you go, in order to most efficiently apply Layer Styles to multiple layers I think it's best if you create and save a style in the Styles panel. Not only are they easy to apply to multiple layers, but they'll be stored in that Styles panel, so that you can use them on any documents that you open in the future.

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