Using Photoshop Blending Effects To Make Your Graphics Stand Out

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

If you’ve never used blending effects in Photoshop you really need to hop on board. Blending effects can be particularly handy when creating the same effect over and over. This is especially beneficial when making graphics for a website that holds a set standard. Save a psd with layer effects applied to it and you can re-create the same look and feel time and time again without re-inventing the wheel.

Today we’ll be adding effects to textual graphics.

1. First off create a new text layer with a font of your choosing. I’m using my standard site font, “Dirty Ego“.

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2. Blending Options Palette: Open the blending options palette. To do this right click on the layer you wish to apply effects to and select, “Blending Options”. This will open the palette up. Here you will have a number of effects to play with.

blending options Using Photoshop Blending Effects To Make Your Graphics Stand Out

3. Drop Shadow: Select drop shadow from the blending options palette. You can keep the default settings where they are, but I find I like just a touch less of a drop shadow on my graphics. So I have the distance and size turned down from 5′s to 3′s.

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4. Stroke: Select stroke from the same palette Here you will have the option to choose your outline color as well as thickness. By default it’s set to 3 pts red, but simply click on the color box to select a new color and reduce the line size in the same palette.

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5. Inner Glow: Again in the blending options palette make your effect selections. Choose Inner Glow. By default the color is set to #ffffbe, but once again you can choose what ever color you wish to choose from the color palette. Select, “Blend Mode”, at the top to get a more controlled inner glow effect. Choose Normal instead of Screen.

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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here.