Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Layer Styles

After all that hard work learning about the different kinds of layers, you’re probably ready for some fun. This section is all about layer styles: a set of fully adjustable, ready-made special effects for layers that you can apply in all kinds of cool ways. Consider this section your reward for sticking with this chapter till the bitter end.

Layer styles are a lot of fun and, since they appear on their own layers, they’re nondestructive and they remain editable as long as you save the document as a PSD file. Layer styles are great for adding finishing touches to designs, and they can make text and graphical elements pop off the page (see Figure 3-38). They also update automatically as your layer content changes.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Nested Smart Objects

Believe it or not, there will be times when you need to convert a smart object into another smart object, to create a nested smart object. Don’t roll your eyes just yet; consider these practical scenarios:

Let’s say you’re retouching a portrait and you converted multiple layers into a smart object so you can apply sharpening to all those layers (called global sharpening). Now you decide to add another round of sharpening to only certain areas—say, your subject’s hair, eyelashes, lips, or the iris of each eye (called selective sharpening). Sure, you can run the sharpening filter on the smart object a second time, but if you use the included mask, you’ll end up hiding both rounds of sharpening because you get only one mask ...