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Day 6: Layers II

welcome back today we continue our discussion on the most important part of photo shop which is layers taking a step further and finding out more things what do with layers yesterday we talked about the concept of layers and adding layers and working with layers moving around in that layer stack and just to review quickly I can't stress enough how important it is that you get in the habit of taking that glance over your layers panel to make sure you have the appropriate layer or layers selected before you go to do whatever you do next and the other important decision you have to make is should I add a new layer or not and the answer is usually based on well it's always based on what you're gonna do next using a tool that's gonna add pixels than generally you want to have another separate layer now later on in this thirty days when we talk about retouching will look at specific techniques where we add multiple layers to be able to retouch faces and things like that to give us plenty of ...

options but for now we're going to move into a different area of layers and some of things you can do when you have layers there how you can work with him so our first example here all I have done previously I have two layers one layer is a photo of a leaf that I have previously extracted so it has a transparent background there's those that pixel transparency that we talked about and I just have a background layer with some color on it and I want to do that so that I can show you some of the options that are available in terms of how we work with this top layer so the first thing I want to talk about is this first menu in the bottom of the layers panel which is the layer styles and it has this whole list I'll show it to you this way so you can see here is the list of all the options that available as layer styles bevel on boss stroke inner shadow in her close satin color over late great overlay pattern overlay outer glow and drop shadow and this is kind of the order in which they will display on your layer so drop shadow being the very bottom and let's start with that one because in this case it would make the most sense so I click on a drop shadow then I have options to control how this drop shadow works so I want to show you this is the layer style dialog walks but very often you have the option while there's basically two ways of getting to it the first way is just double click on the layer the other way is to use this pop up menu and actually pick the effect you want and then it'll jump directly there so to again two ways to the same end result so the drop shadow will say I'll take whatever pixels are on this layer and I'll make a nice little shadow effect now when you look over here here's all the controls for the drop shadow and in typical photoshopped fashion they start off with some default setting and typically the blend mode is multiplied and we'll talk about blood modes shortly and it's a dark color usually black and it's about seventy five percent capacity and that has all this other stuff it says angle and everything else and distance and honestly using these numeric factors for example trying to drag this thing around and find an angle and then decide what distance that's okay after a while you might get used to it but I find the simplest way it's just move your mouse away from the layer style and you'll get what looks just like a move tool now if I click and drag I'm dragging the shadow so I can say I would like the shadow to be right there and then it tells me if I'm interested that's ninety six degrees with a distance of twenty eight pixels okay then I would play around with these other options like spread and most importantly size perhaps because that's the one that's going to give the most shadowy kind of effect now if you go really far just it doesn't look very realistic at all so it's a matter of finding the right kind of numbers that you like any time I could go and change these things I can lower the opacity I could change the blend model though we're not gonna talk about that later most of things you'll change will be the opacity and the size when you have and you're working with the drop shadow one of the options is on by default is used global light and I'll show you what that means because it's an important factor that you probably want on most of the time but well just look at some examples where you might not want that so I'm going to add a couple of more layers I just had some color in here let's pick it up from the leaf on will duplicate that layer so now I want each of these layers toe also have basically the same drop shadow now rather than going in and figuring out okay what was that drop shadow again I'm looking at these numbers I can also just copy it from this one to the other two and there's a couple of ways of doing that the simplest way to me is just position your mouse on top of the word drop shadow hold down option on the mac all for windows and just drag to the other layers and each time you do that you're copying that effect in this case drop shadow so now I have three layers that all have the same settings for the drop shadow it's not it's not the same drop shadow it's the same settings and that's important to know because if I go for example to this top one let's move it over but you can see because this little setting called use global light is on if I go to whatever later I'm on and start to move one shadow see how the other ones are moving to global light suggests I have one light source like the sun or a light of some kind so that if I move one shadow it would make sense for the other shadows to move in conjunction with it you see it's not replicating the exact same settings that saying if there was a light source that put a shadow on this shape this is what the shadow on the next shape would look like so that's what happens by default you don't do anything for that to happen let's say for the sake of argument that you decided you just want this shadow to be completely independent you want to be able just from a design standpoint you want to make it look different so if I go to this drop shadow in turn off global light now what will happen is I'm on ly moving the shadow of the layer that I have clicked on and I obviously clicked on this layer even though I thought I clicked on the other one but that's okay so you can see how now it's working independently if I turn it back on again it will go back to saying well wait I have one light source so that's drop shadow and any time you're looking at your layers panel now if you see that the fx symbol that means this layer has a layer style applied to it just like other layer controls we have the ei icon toe hide and show the overall layer we also have the icon to hide the effects or the individual effects right now I only have one effect but as you'll see in a second if I have more than one of these layer effects than you'll see a list of them and I can decide which one I want to show in which one I don't once you start to have a bunch of layers with these layer styles can get a little bit confusing more cluttered that's what this little indicator on the side if I click on that it just collapses it down to say yep you have a layer style you just can't see it right now but you can see it on the image so that's how we are able to take our layers and have a cleaner looking layers panel but no we still have access to all this information and always you could just double click again to get back to this layer style however note that when you do that it goes to these overall styles not to the individual once you have tio you do that habit of double clicking then you have to be ableto remember to come back and click on the individual shadow or whatever the layer style that you want all right so let's say that now I want to add another layer style to this top layer and I'm gonna change the order here just to make it more make logical sense what I'm looking at it from top to bottom so if I go for example here and choose one of the other options like bevel on him boss that's gonna put a beveled edge on this circle and if I change the size you can see maur obviously what it's doing these are the default settings once again it's important that we recognize that adobe always has to put some defaults now let's talk about that for a second anytime you use just about any function photo shop like in this case you will see some settings now one of two things will happen if you've used the tool or the function like layers down before most of the time it will remember what settings you used and bring those same settings back same with things like filters and things will talk about as often photoshopped has these settings that air called sticky meaning if you change the setting then next time you come back to that tool or function that we use the same settings doesn't always happen and sometimes it will go back to whatever the default settings is whatever adobe put in there and as much as adobe has to put something in there and no disrespect to adobe but let's just say just because something is a default doesn't mean you should use it or doesn't make it good it just means that puts something in there so for example for some tools and functions the default is fifty percent to show you will you go between zero and a hundred but fifty percent isn't necessarily a good number is just where they put it so for example let's look at the defaults here this top of this beveled edge to me looks a little odd it's gone very yellowish very quickly and that's because the highlight is in this function called linear dodge and the highlight is always white so if I said I would really prefer that you use a color that's closer to my original now you see it's a little less yellow than it was before and that's a function of this blend mode which again we'll talk about blend most in a little bit you also might find for example that I often find that the dark part of the bevel and boss is often a little too dark for my taste so I often pull it back a little bit so the opacity isn't as high as it was before and that's one that I I personally prefer all the other settings in terms of depth and size those are the ones is going to control the edge of this looks and you'll see there's options to make hard edged button or smooth or whatever combination you want once I click okay you'll see now if I twirl this down I have two styles and is showing me kind of an order bevel on boss with drop shadow underneath it if you will so now along with being will turn off the entire look I can also go into the individual ones that I don't want a devil in boss or I don't want the drop shadow so you'll see eventually there is a list and let's take it one step further and say even though I started with this color I want to be ableto have a button that I just know it'll go to a particular color that I want and I want it to be this color and click okay so now I've got it's telling me I'm gonna have a beveled edge I'm gonna put color on that and do a drop shadow now if this is a look that you've created that you could see yourself using for multiple purposes maybe you're going to make buttons for a website or some other kind of look where you like this combination one of things you may want to do and I would highly recommend it is create a preset now once again we will talk about the whole concept of presets enough further ahead lesson but right now let's just talk about this because this is actually a really useful function if I'm working in my layer styles and I've done my color overlay whatever it is you'll see one of the options right here is a button that says new style and what that means that will look at the things that I've done here devil nimbus colored overlay drop shadow and create this thing called a preset so if I click on it I could give it some name she could I d that would click where I want it tight before I just start typing is not that smart I want to call it rid button or something like that and I wanted to include my layer effects and click okay now what that means is in a panel over here called stiles if I open that there's my new style that I just created and has a little tiny thumbnail which emulates what I've done there the benefit of doing that is now if I'm working away and this this preset by the ways is important will note the precept that I say it isn't is not tied to this document it's a photo shop reset that that means from now on any document that I'm working on if I want that look I just have to go and find it I'll show you two in the context of this one document but it could be any document now all I do is click on this layer and then hit this button and you'll see it automatically changes it to that the functions that are inside that preset now normally the preset of the styles doesn't look exactly like this it looks a little smaller let's put this back to the way it normally was and then when I do that my little style is going to go away so let's add that back in again explain why that's happened second just like we talked about before photoshopped comes with defaults at all comes with presets and one of my fears that people look at the presets and kind of go really this is a pre set so for example now that I've saved my pre set I can experiment and here's I'm sorry it just makes me laugh that's one of the priest says that adobe provides it's the first one in fact in the list to say isn't that lovely and as you go through some of them are somewhat interesting others are just really really odd not sure why they do those except maybe to give you an example of the kind of presets what I had done previously is I had gone to this pop up menu and here's a list of a whole bunch of other styles that are available what's ironic is many of these styles on this list are really quite good some of the built in default ones are just really odd so the benefit of creating your own preset is now you can replicate that look at any time let me show you what happens if I make a new document now and I'm just gonna add a new layer on let's add some shape and it doesn't really matter what color I fill it with because part of my style is that color so now I click on it and there is the look however it's important to note that this is where you have to look closely what's happening if you look at my layer thumbnail it looks like it's a great rectangle but on the screen it's red that's because the style includes that colored overlay so here's the cool thing about working with ae styles when you apply a style it applies it with whatever you saved in my case belem boss colored overlay and drop shadow however it doesn't mean you're stuck with that because it's just saying well here's the starting point that that preset provides for you so for example I look at this one you think maybe I want more of a beveled edge now that this is a bigger object so I just have to go on double click on my bevel nimbus and make this may be a little larger and maybe in this case it would look better for was chisel hard and the whole point is the preset gives me the settings that it recorded when I saved it but that doesn't mean you're stuck that way you could easily change it so if we look back at some of these otherwise let's just call them unusual choices that adobe have made you all came but you're not that one you always have the option of going in saying all right well I kind of like that now I kind of like that but I'd like to edit it or the other possibility maybe is toe look at something and say how did they do that oh they use something called a grady and overlay so I guess at worst these built in style presets show you how something was created and then you could build on that I would not actually recommend using the ones that are built in by default although as I said some of these other ones look pretty interesting so let's talk about this for one quick second again we'll talk about presets in more detail later but let's say I wanted to look at something called tex effects so when I pulled down this menu is going to say if you want to replace the current styles or append them a pen means add too so now I've got all these extra styles that are available and these are theoretically were created as textiles but they don't need to be you could certainly apply them to any shape at all again interesting choices let's go back to ours but that does bring up an interesting point is that these layer styles can apply to anything so if I come back here let's collapse that I'm gonna hide these two layers for a moment and it's had some text added in a typeface which is a little less weird that was an example by the way of because I last used that typeface it thinks I want to keep using it until I tell it otherwise so let's just use this for the sake of argument and make it just a little smaller so we're working with type remember one of our concepts of the type tool in photo shop is that although you put type on here it acts like a regular layer so once again I could go to my styles and find my devilment boss one in this case looks to me like the bevel nimbus is a little too high the setting is all too high based on this typeface so this is another example where I could go in and say that needs to be a lot smaller that looks a little better and again I might choose just will hard possibly we go and everything's up for debate okay samar I know what I'm not really convinced of that color maybe I like this color instead and you can change everything so working with type works the same way you khun adjust any of the styles whatever it is some of them you'll find when you're working with type of particular smaller type sizes means you may find that some of the normal settings and use for a style or way too much you have to pull him back dramatically just because of the thickness or how thin the letters are in that laywer style but that's otherwise the nice thing is it still works the same way as any other layer I'm gonna just delete that type player and I'm also going to delete the effects here to show you one other option let's take this one off too he said but then didn't actually do it okay all right so one more duplicate I'm gonna just reposition these a little bit so I have three ovals here nice I showed you a moment ago how I do have the option of copying a layer style from one layer to another the only downside to doing that let me show you real quick here again just to clarify what I'm talking about is that same style and then I did that option drag and then do it again so now all three look the same way the problem we should take a problem the downside to doing it that way is now if I decide to change for example the setting for the beveled edge I have to do it three separate times because when you copy ah layer style from one layer to another that means they're now become independent you can edit them independently which is I suppose good but it eliminates the ability for me to say I want to change them all the same time so I'm gonna step backwards to the point where I have no style and I'm going to select all three of these shape these circles click on the first one shift click on the top one and then choose a new group from layers and call it something now if I add my style the differences the style is being added all of them very quickly hold on pause huh okay I can't do it that way all right so picking up from so now that I have these three circles inside this group I can add whatever effect I want for example bevell nimbus and you see as I do it it's applying it to the group so therefore everything inside the group is automatically affected so let's add a drop shadow and put the drop shadow down where want and do our colored overlay of pick up different color of this times for the sake of argument so there's the look I have what you see now the layer effect is applied to the group so the advantage of this there's two of them I could have twenty seven so any time you have multiple layers that you want to look exactly the same way and be ableto edit them together then putting layers inside a group at applying a style to the group makes sense now it is worth noting this is was introduced in photo shop cs six of you have an earlier version you couldn't apply a style to a group like this this was introduced in photo shop csx that's a real nice time saver because it gives you this ability to say on a group basis I don't have to have the group open I just know those circles air in there so now anything I do I can change on the fly very very quickly so that's some key things about layer styles be prepared for the fact that again some of the styles that are built in are a little bit unusual but often they do least give you a good starting point or give you some ideas as to how to work anything that's on a layer by itself can have a style if I clicked on the background layer and attempted to use a layer style it doesn't work so the background layer can't have a style associated with it I'd have to unlock it or duplicated or something to be able to that and honestly there wouldn't be too many times do that because usually the whole point of this is to add a layer style to something that's separate like this later on we'll talk about transformation but for now if I take my leaf layer and I do free transform which is how I scale things up or down by nature the layer style is going to scale with it important little side note here if you scale something from very big very small sometimes the layer style will make its best effort to scale but won't scale quite as much I would look a little odd for example if you had a beveled edge on something large and scaled it down quite small that beveled edge might now look a little too big but you just have to go in and adjust accordingly all right let's talk about another important function of layers which is blend mode so I'm just gonna open another document here the concept of blend modes is this when you add a layer you have more than one layer it only works with more than one layer so I have a text layer that is yellow and it's sitting on top of it the moment I've hidden another layer but here's my background layer underneath it by default any time you add a layer it's in this blend mulk blend mode called normal which just means the layer you're working on is completely independent of any other layer underneath it if it's yellow taxes just yellow taxed end of story the opacity is we saw lets the yellow be more see through to the bottom but blend modes are like these mathematical equations that says let me take a look at the pixels of the larrier on and compare them with the pixels on the layer below and give you some effect and I think at this point is important to understand that these things exist I'm in no way going to recommend that you understand what each one of them do like a lot of things in photo shop you'll probably find there's a core of blend modes they use all the time but there's others that you hardly ever use and I'll show you a shortcut way to kind of look through so let's go back here and for example if I change the blend mo to darken see right away that I didn't change the opacity but now because this text layer is yellow it's looking at the layer below and blending it together if I take my move tool even where I position it is gonna have a different effect so all of this first set is going to really kind of it's almost like well let's look at multiplies example it's almost like you're literally multiplying them together to say take this yellow of the type player and times that by the background and always gonna have this kind of darker look uh there's a whole bunch again we're not gonna go very one it's important note that sometimes as you go through and look at something you will try some layer style neither nothing will appear to change or your layer will disappear completely and that's because it's completely dependent on the larrier on and the layer or layers underneath so don't be surprised if you try a blend mode and kind of go what happened why did either why did nothing change or why did everything disappear completely and that will happen so for example here when I have the layer up on the top screen mode doesn't appear to do anything but when I moved to a different position now you see it is having an effect based on the colors underneath and just to show you how dramatic this works let's put it back too multiply mode and sian multiply mode with this layer in some places it almost disappears completely but if I show this other layer it really disappears completely because the back of the this layer is so dark that my type disappears if I move it down it's a little more visible by change it to screen mode here again up at the top where it's really dark it almost has no effect but as I pull it down here you see it's it's starting to have an effect as we go so the benefit of working with thes blend most but come see some really interesting ways without really too much effort to see what something looks like by changing too overlay mode see how that's actually getting some of the texture where you're seeing through again I still haven't lowered the opacity so it's important that I could also do that as well as change the blend mode here's my one of my favorite things about working with these types of layered functions so I just changed my text layer to overlay and fifty percent capacity if I save this psd file next time I open it it will look just like this but I know that if I look at it later and kind of go yeah I know I could change the blend mode back to normal on the opacity back two hundred and I'm right back to square one remember a few days ago we talked about the history panel on the fact that history is an interesting way to change your mind but on ly right as you're working on the document here's why working with layers changes things because it means it's like unlimited undo because I added this type player in yellow at one hundred percent capacity it means at any time I can get back to that same setting just by changing the blend mode in the opacity back the way it was initially so we always have that option one of things that I will suggest to you is that there's a core of blend modes people tend to use such as multiply screen overlay if there was like a hit parade of blood mo's those air probably up there in terms of the top ones that people use others less so like difference really changes it completely the point where it's no longer the same color it's almost like a color negative I put it on top of this other layer you see again it's going to have a very different effect so the bottom line is how do you know and there are some people that have developed an ability kind of go through and go ok in this circumstance I know that I always use multiply mode in this circumstance I know I was overly mode okay you might but here is the more likely scenario especially when you're first getting started and this I'll tell you now this will be what the frig really I don't know where it is so this way you can that's kind of cool hugh interesting so this is the beauty of blend modes is that you'll the result you get is completely dependent on the layer you're on what color is it has and the layer underneath and what colors it has and you always get different notes for example you could use difference mode on one set of two layers and get something very different than difference mode on another two set of layers and that's the beauty of this is that that it's always going to give you some mathematical result but the result will be different based on the colors that you're working with so sometimes you'll say this blend mode is a perfect solution other times it will be a different blend mode and again let me reiterate the same fact that you can also do blend mode and opacity so that if you try and blend more like ours that's really close to what I want you can also change the opacity of that layer as well now let's put this back to normal for a second here's something that a lot of people frankly probably wouldn't talk about early on in a session like this on photo shop but I think it's such a powerful function that it's really worth talking about I'm going to add a new layer on top here and all I'm going to do is going to fill that layer with a grady in't that goes from black toe white this and then I'm gonna add another oops wrong tool another one I'll take the great into on gold the other way just so we have something to compare now needless to say you don't often probably put a black and white grady in on a layer to do this but this will demonstrate how this function works and then you'll see ways that we could use it what I'm gonna do is double click on the layer to go back to that layer style box but instead of working with any of these layer stiles I'm going to go to this area over here that says blend if you'll see it says this layer and underlying layer so this layer means the layer I'm on underlying layers whatever layers below so if I take this white triangle and start to drag it in you'll see everything on this layer that's brighter than this I'ii part of my gray and starts to disappear if I take the black end I can make the darker part of the great and disappeared I could also take the underlying layer and start to push it through by saying I want this to be more prominent now this looks like a pretty dramatic function because it is but once again it's still a layer function so that if you try this and then come back later and think ok that didn't quite work the way I want to see this little symbol on the side just like you had an fx simple for the layer style this is a symbol introducing cs six by the way that that indicates that it has some kind of blending options put on so you can always put it back again now let's try that with the other layer below instead and you see in this case when I start to pull it it does a nice job of getting weirder things but notice how the edges kind of jagged that happens because it's very pixel specific to say every pixel brighter than this make it see through every pixel darker than this make it visible and we get that kind of edge so if you look really closely there's a little line in the middle of that triangle by hold down option or altai khun split that triangle into two halfs and now I say get a much smoother transition and I could do the same thing on this end see I got a very kind of odd jagged edge happened there option all split will make a much softer transition click okay look how cool that is I mean that was just something I was playing with it it's a really interesting edge there is a small catch of this though you have to be prepared for take a look at the let me explain first and then we'll show you when we when you look at the layer thumbnail it looks like the whole rectangle with that hard edge is still there because technically it is the blend of sliders is a way of saying temporarily make those pixels appear to be c thru but technically they're still there which is a good thing for the most part cause I can go back and change it so here's what I was talking about see how this really cool nice edge here but then look at the layer thumbnail and you could see it still has a very hard edge that's because I could decide to go back and put this right back the way it wass so you can experiment with this and some really interesting ways knowing that it's a no editable feature that you can always change now realistically as I said you probably wouldn't just put a grady and on top of a layer by itself but it could be very useful for for example if you have red logo on a white background just want very quickly get rid of all the white to make it appear like a transparent layer that's where we could use blend if sliders the cool thing about blended sliders is there you can tell really quickly if it's gonna work or not because as soon as you move that slider you'll start to get an effect and get it feedback of what that effects gonna work the down side is it's very global meaning if you had a logo that was white and red on a white background all the white would disappear including the white you might want to keep kind it's a global function so unfortunately don't have a level of control to say on ly make this one area the pixels go away but this is this is just the reality of how it works so again the beauty of the blend if option is that it's so quick and you can get results like this knowing you can go back and edit it at any time which is really quite an interesting function all right let's delete that layer I want to show you one other thing about layers you may have already noticed this that whenever I'm working on a layer I have up here it says whatever blend mode I'm on and then opacity hundred percent there's also something that says fill one hundred percent let's talk about that for a second so these two commands opacity and phil at first glance they're goingto appear to do the same thing and the only time that phil had plays a different role is when you incorporate layer styles so let's take a look at what that looks like so first of all let's put this back to normal and you see if I take my type player and I lower the opacity then I'm making the pixels on that layer mohr see through toe whatever layers below put that back two hundred now if I lower the phil opacity it's doing exactly the same thing that the net result is exactly the same and the reason is I don't have any layer style here so let's go to our layer style and let's do for example bevel in boss let's do chisel hard like that and click okay so there's are my settle bevel effect if I lower the opacity now you see everything on that layer including the layer style becomes see through that's what capacity does phil says well since you have a layer style the only thing that I will affect the opacity of is the middle of your laywer in other words the phil color in this case yellow if I go all the way to zero you see now I have what some people would call a clear in boss meaning is going to not have any color at all is going to look at whatever's underneath it and give you that effect so any time you see opacity one hundred percent but phil zero that suggests that on that layer there is some kind of effect a layer style like a bevel on boss or whatever it might be and you only want to see that if you change your mind you khun bring a little bit of the color back in by putting the philo passing a little higher or take it all the way back up and ignore that completely but it's another example of something that is an option available to you now phil opacity again just to clarify we generally only bother using full opacity when we have one arm or layer styles for example they had a drop shadow and you only want to see the drop shadow and have the text disappear that's kind of the idea that's what we do it for so let's go back to this example and I'm gonna put this on here I'm not going to a drop shadow because that wouldn't work in this case but let's go here and try on one called elder glow which kind of puts this glow around the outside I'm gonna put it back to normal and bigger you can kind of see the effect something like that once I've done that got this weird glow thing happening now once again we take the phil opacity lowered all the way to zero now all we're seeing is the other glow once we've done that then we can go back in and see what happens if we change any of the settings in here then we can do that now as I'm doing this it reminded me that one of the things that that I touched on early on in one of the first sessions was the whole permission to experiment things so just to revisit that for one second as I started playing with sliders there with this outer glow on this particular background honestly I had really no expectation are really knew exactly what was gonna happen but that's okay because I knew I could always either hit the cancel button or undo it if I didn't like it so one of the things that that I always stress to people if you're concerned about I'm not sure what this does I'm looking at that for example spread versus size I don't know what this does so just try it as you move it you'll say ok that does that all right that's more like this what does this do what's contour and as you ok that's weird I want to do that but that's part of the point is that it's okay because you're still in preview mode and even if you did make a decision and click okay you could either undo that last thing you just did or you could go back to the outer glow and try some other kind of function so any time you're working with layer based functions that's one of its biggest benefits is the fact that it's got that built in undo and history where you can always go back and change her mind any time at all so that's a real plus so as we're working on projects there'll be plenty of times where you'll see what happens if I try something with the blend mode in opacity let me just open a document here pause while I find the document don't show this part please so here's the document that I put together and later on we'll see how to do it and I just took two photos of the same girl might may start to make this little collage but then I look at this layer and see what happens if I lower the opacity so she's less visible dough I like that or not maybe maybe not maybe I want to take my type player and see what would happen if I had a drop shadow on it to make it stand out a little more and put the drop shadow over here but I want the drop shadow to be a darker version of the same color working on a layer document you just try things to say what would it look like if remember our expression I want to end up with a particular kind of look in my head I'm picturing then one of the simplest ways do that say what happens if I lower the opacity changed the blend mode whatever it might be that's where you start getting administering results let's try the blend mode on this one I don't think it's gonna look very good but let's see and not so much but you know what it wasn't a bad idea to try it because you might come to a point kind of go actually I didn't thought about doing a black and white but I may like that in this case I don't actually but that's kind of the idea is it's just that whole experimental thing sometimes in photo shop we know exactly what we want to do I want to take this object put it over there I want to move it this way and I want to add a drop shadow other times it's like photo shop is your sketch pad and you're going I don't exactly know what I want to do with this I want to try something so I'm gonna just say ok let's make some layers and then start experimenting some people would call it playing I don't it's maur experimentation to say oh what can I do with this let's try this let's try that and see what happens and the good part about experimenting is the more you do that then the next time you may have a better idea to say if I change the blend moto multiply and lower the phil opacity then it'll give me the result that I so for this time around all I would suggest is do something real simple just to kind of get this little firm in your head make a new document fill it with some colored background or open a photograph either way at a type player had some type and then start experimenting with different blend modes at a layer style and change the the film rapacity just kind of experiment some of those things we talked about today so you start to get a feeling for how these laywer functions could help you and we'll see you tomorrow