*** From the Archives ***

This article is from February 6, 2002, and is no longer current.

Photoshop Layer Styles: “One-Click” Flexibility

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Layer Styles can provide an ideal way to get the quality, speed, and flexibility that make for successful Photoshop solutions. With Layer Styles you can design, save, and reapply an almost limitless number of combinations of colors, tones, gradients, strokes, and images (in the form of patterns and textures), plus the dimensionality of bevels, shadows, glows, and “reflections.” Once you’ve designed and saved it as a preset, a Style also provides you with the extremely practical opportunity to apply it to any other type, graphic, or photo and have it automatically conform to the shape of the new recipient.

The Layer Style dialog box is the “Erector set” that lets you experiment with the hundreds of variables that make up a Style, starting from scratch or modifying an existing preset Style. When you develop a Style you like, you can save it as its own preset by clicking the New Style button and naming your new creation.

Preparing the File

A layout was assembled, with each element on a separate layer. Type was set in two separate layers in Arial Black, so we would be able to apply different Styles to the two settings. We wanted to be able to use a Style to assign a texture or image to the background of our composition. But since the Background is the only kind of layer than can’t accept a Style, we double-clicked on the Background’s thumbnail to turn it into a “Style-friendly” layer with the potential for transparency.

A The converted background layer

B The headline type

C The photos

D The small type

“One-Click” Application

With the Wow Project Styles.asl file loaded in the Styles palette, each layer was targeted by clicking its name in the Layers palette, and with one click in the Styles palette a Style was applied:

A 185 Wow-Bamboo Wall, a Style made with a photographic Pattern Overlay

B 185 Wow-Big Cat Type, a dimensional Style made with shadows and glows, with a photographic pattern and a tint

C 132 Wow-Attention Type Halo on some layers and 100 Wow-Spot Type Halo on others

D 308 Wow-Haloed G Textured

(continued)


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  • anonymous says:

    Without the files referred to (Wow styles)(unless they were there and i didn’t see them) the article was just a BAD advertisement for your Wow book. There was almost no actual content, just illustrations from the book. Save it!

  • anonymous says:

    This was not an article or a how-to. It was an advertisement. Not one thing was actually explained. And if the book is like this, doing no better job of actually explaining how to accomplish a task , you can keep that too.

  • anonymous says:

    We apologize if the story wasn’t satisfying for you. Truthfully, we saw this more as tutorial on how you can adapt these techniques to your own work, not as a ploy to make you rely on the authors’ styles. But I can see how you might interpret it that way so we’ll be more careful in the future.
    Thanks,
    Pamela Pfiffner, editor in chief

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