Accessing the Layers Dialog Box in Photoshop

Series Summary

There was a time when the creation of a drop shadow in Photoshop necessitated a physics degree and three advanced courses in technical manual lingo. But thanks to the continuing advances of this outstanding software, such a Herculean feat can now be accomplished with the press of a button. Just tell the program a few basic parameters, press enter, and then adjust your handiwork as you watch it change. Perhaps this and other advances explained in this series will not change the world, but for graphic designers and production artists, the revolution has begun!

In this series of Photoshop lesson videos, our professional graphic designer will guide you through the layers features of this popular Adobe program. Add flash, flare and your own personal style to logos, magazines, websites, advertisements and newsletters with the tips and techniques you learn in these instructional video clips. Jimmy Hartman gives you a tour of the layers features in Photoshop, then demonstrates how to use features such as emboss, glow and bevel on objects you have created in Photoshop or even other drawing programs such as Freehand and Illustrator. What to know how to add a dropshadow to a photograph? Watch and you will learn the easy way, without having to wade through confusing manuals and help menus.

Video Transcript

"JIMMY HARTMAN: Hi, this is Jimmy on behalf of Expert Village. And in this clip, I'm going to show you how to access the layer styles palette in Photoshop in order to start applying your effects. Okay, let's go ahead and get started here. First thing, we're going to make a new file here. Go to File, New. Shortcut for this is Ctrl+N. I'm going to accept 500 x 320. That will be fine for this example. And I'm going to increase the area of this. I'm going to zoom in to a hundred percent here. Now, I'm going to--to see our layer effects better, I'm going to go and use a dark background here. So I'm going to go to layers. And to make--to fill a layer with a certain color, you use your background color here. I've selected this dark blue. And to fill your selected layer, you hold down the control key and then you hit backspace, and it will fill your layer with the background color. All right. I'm going to create a new layer for my object, and then I'm going to go ahead and choose the Ellipse tool here and create a circle while in the shift key. And that should be good for now. Okay. Now, we need to access the layer styles dialogue. So we'll get our layers panel open. There's a couple of ways you can do this. One is to act this Effects button at the bottom here of your layers palette. It gives you a list of all the layer styles you can use, so you can set which particular one you want. Or you can go to the right of the name of the layer you're on. You double-click in this area--this blank area, and that brings up your layer styles dialogue box. And as you can see on the left, you have all your layer styles; and on the right, you'll have options for each individual layer style. We won't be getting into the blending--the default blending options here too much. We're just going to kinda start on the styles for now."