An essential tool in my designers bag of tricks is the humble screen ruler.  There are a number of free screen rulers available on the web and throughout my career, there has always been one loaded on my system.  In my line of work I build a lot of wireframes and site design mockups and being able to quickly and easily determine the size of various elements in a page layout has been a huge time saver. read more…

One of the most powerful tools available in PhotoShop is the Layer Effects tool but is can also be a bit confusing unless you understand a bit more about what’s going on when you use them.  Layer Effects allow you to quickly apply a number of commonly used effects to the layer of your choice.  Many of the effects are commonly used “cliché” techniques such as outer glow, drop shadow and stroke. 

 While these effects sound pretty obvious, by making some simple adjustments to the settings of each effect you can quickly produce some very stunning and unexpected effects.  In this demo I am going to use a simple application of Layer Effects to text to illustrate what can be accomplished in just seconds with Layers Effects tools.

 I am starting with a 400×400 pixel canvas and placing some text in the center.

 

You can open the Layer Effects tools by double clicking on your layer in the Layers Palette or you can go to Layer>Layer Style. To start with let’s apply a basic drop shadow.  Check the box next to Drop Shadow and there you have it, the classic drop shadow we have all come to know and love.  But what else can we do?  By adjusting the size down to 0, the distance to 1 and setting the opacity to 100% we now have an embossed or 3D look to the text.  Pretty easy right?  Let’s see what else we can do.

 

Let’s apply a gradient to our text.  Check the box next to Gradient Overlay.  Now click on the Gradient color bar and adjust your colors.  You can adjust the colors at the high and low end of your gradient by selecting the tiny color swatch box.  I am going with a nice warm orange to yellow gradient.  Wow, that’s pretty nice and what did that take us?  Thirty seconds maybe?

 Next, let’s stroke the text.  Click the box for Stroke.  Select the dropdown for Fill Type and you will see that we have more options.  Why stroke this with a solid color when we can stroke a gradient?  I have selected a linear gradient and am using a nice steel blue color set.

 

Notice that when we set our stroke our drop shadow went away!  Each of the blending options in your Layer Style dialog box  are applied in the same order they are displayed in the dialog.  Essentially this means that our drop shadow is applied but is covered by our 3 pixel stroke.  Don’t worry; we have a workaround for this.

 Drop shadows are applied behind the subject image or text.  That only makes sense right?  After all, the shadow generally appears behind the subject.  Since we are using the drop shadow setting for more of a 3D effect we want it back.  So how do we get our drop shadow effect back with the stroke blocking our view?  The answer is Inner Shadow.  Click on the check box next to Inner Shadow to activate the style properties.  The first thing you will notice is that it looks just like the Drop Shadow settings.  Once again set size to 0, distance to 1 and opacity to 100%.  Make sure to adjust your angle so that the effect is applied to the right edge of our text.  There you have it.  We have recreated the effect but because Inner Shadow is applied to the text rather than behind the text our effect shows above the stroke.

 

Now that we have achieved our 3D effect using Inner Shadow we have a drop shadow that is no longer being used.  By adjusting the distance of the shadow and the size we can make our text really pop.  Remember that we have stroked our text 3 pixels so we are going to need a minimum drop shadow distance of 3 pixels in order for it to be seen.  I have adjusted the distance to 7 and the size to 8.  I have also changed the opacity to 64% to make it nice and soft.

 

Here is the end result of our work.  In a very short time we created some striking text.  What’s even more amazing is your layer palette.  You will notice that we achieved this with only one layer.  In the bad old days we would have needed 5 or 6 layers to pull this off.  This is a very simple illustration of the power of Layer Effects.  Stay tuned for more advanced demos to come!

For fun, I have been working on a mock gorilla marketing campaign I am calling Massive Brand.  In this tutorial I will show you how to create the appearance of a painted stencil over a textured background.  This is a quick and easy way to place logos, images or text into images in a way that makes them blend with the environment.

I am starting with this stock photo from the New York subway.  We will be placing the Massive logo stencil on the column on the left side of the photograph.  We have several things to contend with in order to make this stencil realistic looking, lighting, texture and motion.

 

I start by creating a new layer and dropping in my artwork.  In this case I am using the Massive “Dude” in black.  I would like this to appear as though it was painted on the column using a stencil and black spray paint.

 

Overspray
After inserting the “dude” graphic, make a copy of it.  Select the top “dude” layer and move it 2 pixels to the right and 2 pixels up. Now move to layer 1 and select the shape by holding the CTRL key and clicking on the shape.  With the shape highlighted, select layer 2 and press Delete.  This will create a halo around the graphic.

 

 

Use the Eraser to remove some of the halo, leaving a realistic portion of overspray.

 

Next, select Gaussian Blur and apply a blur of 2.0 to the halo in layer 2.

To simulate overspray from a stencil, we need a nice sharp line on the inside and a fuzzy edge on the outside.  Select the shape again by holding CRTL and clicking on the shape in layer 1.  With the “dude” Shape highlighted, move the highlighted shape 1 pixel right and 1 pixel up.

 

Motion Blur
This photo features a motion blur showing movement down the track to the center of the photograph as the train passes by.  We need to simulate this same blur on our layers.  Select layer 1 and go to Filters>Blur>Motion Blur.  Set the motion angle to 16 and the distance to 3.  This creates the directional blur we need.  Apply the same motion blur to layer 2.

 

Opacity
The final step is to set the layer type and opacity.  Set both layers to Overlay and adjust the opacity of layer 1 to 85%.  Set the opacity of layer 2 to 52% and you are done.  Overlay allows us to see the texture of the column through the graphic giving us the appearance of paint.  It also has the effect of simulating the lighting in the scene giving us a very authentic looking bit of street art.

Final Image