Drop Shadows for Style Buttons in Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jimmy Hartman on behalf of Expert Village and in this clip, we'll be continuing our second Web 2.0 style button. Moving on, if you'll remember the image I showed you at the beginning of this part of the tutorial, there's not much more to the main part of the button than this part right here except for a couple of strokes and a drop shadow effect. Let's go ahead and start with that. First thing, let's go ahead and select our background layer to add the first stroke around it. Go to layer style and go to stroke. We'll leave it on the outside and I think about three pixels will be perfect for it. So, let's change the color to white. We'll go ahead and okay. We can't see much there but we'll go ahead and fix that here in a minute. Let's control click our button background layer to load a selection and we'll go to select, modify, expand. Since the stroke we just did was three pixels, we'll go ahead and expand it by three pixels. Select okay. That will kind of put us at the outside of this image here. Let's go ahead and make a new layer on top of all the other ones. We'll go to edit, stroke. This will allow you to do, basically, any selection you have, it will stroke that selection with the color of your choice. So, we're going to leave it with the two pixels and change our color to, pretty close to black here. Click okay. Make sure it's on the outside, so we don't overlap our other stroke. Hit okay. Control "d" to de-select and that's the button there. So let's go ahead and rename that layer to "outside stroke". And the last thing is we want to add a bit of a drop of shadow to the back of the button to give it a little bit of depth here. So let's go ahead and open layer styles for that. Click drop shadow, and we'll go ahead and change the distance to zero, so it's directly behind it and it will appear on all sides. We'll just bring up our size until we get a little bit of the effect. That looks pretty good. Hit okay. That gives us, pretty much; all there is to the button. Now we just have to go ahead and add the text."