Did you know that there is a wonderful feature inside Photoshop called "layer styles"? You just apply with your chosen style with a single click and you'll instantly have a complex set of parameters applied to the looks of your selected layer.
Make instant charms and embellish your:
- textures
- clipart
- dingbat fonts
- text
- frames
- brush strokes
- shapes
You can make your own styles or download them from elsewhere. Here you have instructions on how to install them and use them:
Installing Styles
The most used way is to unzip the styles file (the one that has the .asl extension) to your Presets\Styles folder.
This folder is located under your primary Photoshop folder, where you have the program installed.
(Example: C:\Program Files\Photoshop\Presets\Styles)
You can also load styles files from anywhere in your hard disk. So you can actually unzip the styles file to the
location of your choice and have your files organized to suit your needs.
Loading Styles
Open the Styles panel and click on the little arrow to the right. (img. 1)
Click on “Load Styles” and locate the file in the folder you previously unzipped the file.
A dialog box will appear, asking if you want to replace your current Styles with the new set. (img. 2)
Click OK. Note: “replace” here doesn’t mean that your current Styles are going to be deleted. They will still be
available in their location on your hard disk and you can recall them the same way we are loading these styles now.
The style set now appears on the panel. Now you should see a thumbnailed list of the available Styles.
Another way to load styles is simply by dragging and dropping the .asl file into Photoshop: the styles you dropped inside Photoshop will appear in the Styles panel.
Applying Styles
Open the image you want to apply the style to. As these are layer Styles, they cannot be applied to the
background. Also, the layer you’ll apply the style to should have transparency, like in this example. (img. 3)
Otherwise, the style will still be applied, but it will cover the entire canvas.
Now, with the layer selected in the layers panel, click on the style you want to use in the Styles panel. (img. 4)
Voilá! You have applied the layer style to your selected layer.
Tips and tricks
- If you want to apply another style, simply click on the style’s thumbnail you want to apply on the Styles panel. It will apply automatically.
- If you want to clear the style, click on the “clear style” button at the bottom of the Styles panel.
- All Styles work differently according to a number of factors. One of them is the area they are covering. Some work best on large areas, while some others work better on
small areas or thin lines. You can check this out by making a document with several layers that contain different sized and shaped objects, and then apply the same style to each one of the layers.
You’ll then be able to see what kind of areas that particular style works best on.
- You can apply layer Styles to any layer that contains transparency, it doesn’t matter what method you used to place the actual pixels on that layer. You can use them on brushed strokes (or "stamps"), filled masks, filled shapes and text. The text doesn’t even have to be rasterised before applying a style, so you can change your text and font while the style is applied to see how the changes will look like. This includes dingbat fonts too, of course!
- You can try the following when your style doesn’t look very good on a particular layer, because the covered area is either too big or too small:
Right-click on the small layer effects symbol and then click on "Scale Effects". You can then reduce or increase the scale of the effects from 1% to 1000%. You don’t even have to give it ok to see the difference: whenever you change the number, the image will refresh and when your image looks better, you can "ok" it.
- Some styles have bitmap image textures embedded. Therefore, you should be careful when scaling the effects because the patterns may look pixelated or blurry if you scale the style too much. Try and see what works for you.
- Layer styles "remember" the resolution the document had when they were created. So, if they are 300 ppi (pixels per inch) when saved, they will show exactly the way they were saved only if the document they are later applied to is 300 ppi as well. This has nothing to do with printing resolution
(dpi) or anything related to image quality, it is simply the scale they are shown at. This means sometimes you will apply a style and it won’t look like in the promos or previews you saw when downloading. Don’t panic! There is an easy way to make them look as they’re intended: go to the menu Image--Image size... and uncheck the Resample Image option. Then, change the number in the Resolution field to something different. The most common resolutions to work are 72 ppi and 300 ppi. So if your document is at 72 ppi, try 300 ppi and viceversa. As you turned off resampling, the image won’t change its size (pixel dimensions). It will look exactly like before. Now reapply the style and you’ll see the difference. If it still doesn’t look like it should, try the above steps again. Once you found the right resolution, all styles in the set will work fine.
Remember you can always change the resolution back (without resampling the image!) after you finished working with the styles. Once you applied them on a layer, it won’t change its appearance even if you change the resolution of the document unless you reapply the styles.
Styles are a wonderful way of making killer graphics quickly and easily.
