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OK, I admit it... I'm an add-ons junkie! Anyone
who has had any contact with my work knows this already through
my work with actions, my writing about actions, by maniacal
devotion to the Actions Palette. It's sick, really!
So here I am, perfectly content to develop
actions all day long, and along comes Photoshop 6. Now I'm no
longer content in my little single dimensional world, because
those fantastic Photoshop programmers have upped the ante...now
we can record not only actions, but entire groups of effects
applied to a single layer.
What does this mean? Well, previously the
designer had to manually apply their effects to a particular
layer. Say you have some text sitting there all lonely, and you
want to dress it up to match color, bevel, and shading to the 30
or so images that will also be on a web page. In 5.0 we had to
walk through adding the drop shadow, bevel, gradients,
highlighting, etc. for that layer, or record this layer 'style'
in an action to replay later. Now actions are fast, but layer
styles can actually be faster, as they save your settings in one
command. Better yet, you can save your initial settings into a
layer style, and just reapply that saved style to any layer you
want, on any image you want. Cool, huh? Granted you cannot use
filters, tools, and such in layer styles as you can in droplets
and actions, but the commands you can insert are a power unto
themselves, especially in combinations.
We will walk through the creation of a layer
style next time, but for this article I want you to become
familiar with styles by looking at those included with Photoshop
6. Here's a snapshot of the Layer Styles Default setup:
This view is the 'Small Thumbnail view, but
there are actually 5 views for the layer styles:
• Text Only
• Small Thumbnail
• Large Thumbnail
• Small List
• Large List
In addition to the default layer styles shown
above, Adobe has been so kind as to include even more Layer
Styles Sets:
• Buttons
• Glass Button Rollovers
• Glass Buttons
• Image Effects
• Text Effects
• Textures
Try loading these one at a time to get a feel
for what effects you can do on the fly. I also recommend you
walk through the various viewing modes to see which works best
for you. I find that the small thumbnail view is easiest to
manage, but that is a personal preference.
So what exactly do these styles do? Here's a
quick walkthrough with examples. Beginning with a simple text
layer, we can go from this...
to this....
with one selection- one mouse click!!! Not to
mention we can apply this effect over and over and over until
the proverbial cows come home.
One more time:
and again with the text:
This powerful tool is an excellent assistant to
website designers who want site continuity, as well as being
extremely fun to play with. |