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My wife makes the claim that, as I get older, I
don't pay attention as much as I used to. I forget more and some
things just take longer to sink into the grey matter than they
used to. I'm not saying she's 100 percent on the question of my
diminishing attention span, but on days like today I have to
give her some credit. Just don't tell her that!
I've been working with styles for the past few
weeks, and knew that they were powerful. I just didn't grasp how
powerful they could be until I started tearing them apart, piece
by delicate piece. In so doing, I wanted to see what the new
Layer Styles Stoke command offered above the standard 5.0 stroke
that we all know and love. As a result, I find my world has
been, in no uncertain terms, 'Rocked'.
Now I know we just spent the last 3 weeks going through Layer
Styles, but please bear with me! I think that you will see what
I mean shortly. To begin with, I created some standard black
text. I then applied a layer style I created called 'Turquoise
Tweaked2'. Here's the effect:
This was a fairly easy layer style to create. If
you would like this Style, come to my website (http://actionfx.com),
click my email and send me a request. I'll be happy to send it
to you (there are 20 or so in this set).
So anyway, there I was messin' around with these
layer styles and playing with the stroke option. In 5.5 we were
only allowed to use a color for stroke, which we could later
tweak to look like metal or whatever our fancy desired. But take
a look at this:
Do you know what the difference is? That's
right, you can now apply a gradient to a stroke, and not only a
typical linear or radial gradient. This gradient type is called
a shape burst... that is the gradient is applied outward from
the edges of the images. In this manner the gradient adjusts to
the contours of the text, button or image being manipulated.
Here is the same text with the Stroke changed from Outside to
Center:
Once more, we change it from Center to Inside :
Uh oh... here's the part where my wife gets
frightened. My imagination tells me that we can take this a bit
further if we throw a few filters into the mix. Let's give it a
shot, shall we?
Ok, I'm going to swap the stroke back to
'Center'. Here's a picture of the settings from the Stroke
Options in the Layer Styles Console:
Something I should have mentioned in the
previous series and neglected to was this, and it is VERY
important:
In order to apply filters to a layer styled
layer, you must merge that layer with another. What I mean is,
say you have applied this style seen above and now would like to
apply a plastic wrap to the image. You must create a new layer
below the Styled layer, select the styled layer and merge down.
This will permanently affix the style to the layer so it is now
part of the image.
So, having merged my layer with a blank one, I
can now run filters on the image created.
Oops... almost forgot my own number one rule:
NEVER alter the base image! So I'll duplicate the image layer
and work on a copy.
These seem to be excellent colors for a dark
background, so I'll fill the background layer with black. Not
bad...
... but we can spice it up even more. Let's
duplicate our duplicate, and apply a plastic wrap to both. Set
the new duplicate layer to overlay, and we come up with this:
Now we have some plastic going on! But... but...
but...
Yeah, we are working on the Stroke option in the
layer styles. Not only am I more absent minded these days, but
also easily distracted by pretty effects. ;-)
Back to the stroke. Select the original
duplicate layer. Select the layer styles icon on the bottom of
the styles palette to open the control panel. This is a little
trick I call a 'Channel Fake'. Basically we can use the gradient
stroke to give the illusion of rendered lighting effects! Take a
peek. Here are the settings...
...and here's the effect:
See how the combination of gradients applied to
the stroke, with a little help from our trusty sidekick Plastic
Wrap Boy, gave us the illusion of having 3 dimensional plastic
text? This short exercise is only the tip of the iceberg. Layer
Styles are your friend, and we haven't even begun to work on
Photos yet. I can hardly wait! |