Using Outer Glow in Photoshop Layers

Video Transcript

"JIMMY HARTMAN: Hi, this is Jimmy Hartman on behalf of Expert Village. And in this clip, we'll be looking at the Outer Glow layer style and going over its parameters. Okay, let's move on to the Outer Glow style. Let's go ahead and select this here. Now, you see we have an Outer Glow applied to the outer edges of our object. First, we're going to start with our Size and Spread sliders. These are the same as the Drop Shadow Size and Spread. So, as you can see, it increases the size of the shadow. And the Spread basically increases the size of the layer mask before applying the shadow. What that means is, in layman's terms, it's making this circle here, it's extending the edges of it out to this edge here and then applying a shadow on from there. So that's why this glow right here looks pretty solid. So I'll move that back down to get kind of a hazy glow. The technique, you have Softer and you have Precise. Precise is used for--if you're putting a glow on text or an object with sharp edges or many details in the edges, we use Precise. It doesn't look good on our circle, here, but it will actually accent those edges. I'm going to show you what I mean here. Go click Okay and create a new text layer here at the bottom. Glow. All right. And for this layer, we'll go and add a layer style here and we'll put the Outer Glow. And you see our glow here. We'll give it a little bit of size. Now, let's change it to Precise. And now, you can see how the glow floats around these edges and actually shows you where the edges are on this text. So that's pretty much the only thing that that technique there does. Okay, now back to our circle here. We'll go back to the top of the list. We've got our Blend mode, our Opacity here, which works the same as any of the other ones, Noise, which is the same as for the shadows. You've got your Color Picker, the color of the shadow here, or the, sorry, the Glow. You kinda pick a custom color, whatever you want it to look like here. And you can also pick from preset glows. Certain glows, you can come down here and change the colors by double-clicking on any of these sliders here, kind of make your own custom gradient here. And moving down to the Quality, you've got your Contour, again, which is just like your shadows here; kind of play around with that to get different, different effects. Your Range is how far the contour is applied over the shadow here. Fifty percent means the contour starts at the outer edge and ends at the inner edge. If you were to lower that, so we'll come down to, say, around 20 here, the contour is applied only for 20% of that shadow. So it starts here and ends here and then you just have solid glow. And if you increase it over 50, you just start to lose parts of the contour. Okay. Those are about all the effects in our Outer Glow. So we'll be moving on to Inner Glow next."