Lessons
Lesson Info
Layer Styles: Bevel and Emboss
Now, those groups can be used for other purposes as well. Let's take a look here where I have individual bars, each one being on a separate layer, and those bars are contained within a group. So if I turn off the eyeball in the group, that affects all the layers contained within it, and therefore, it hides or shows all those layers. Well, if I were to come in here and decide that I want to apply a layer style, let's say the layer style I'd like to work with is called Bevel and Emboss. And I come in and apply one of those. This one looks fancy because the last time I used this particular feature was when we had a complex kinda artsy image on screen that used these settings. But if you want your bevel and emboss to look different, the key is to change this thing called the Gloss Contour. But we're not trying to talk about those right now. So I just wanted to let you know that if you're wondering why it looked different than a normal bevel and emboss, that's the setting that is key. So an...
yway, I've applied it there. Now I wanna take that same bevel and emboss and apply it to all the other layers that are here, and there are many different ways of doing that. But one of them is to come to the letters fx on this layer and right-click on it, and if you do, you're gonna find the choice of Copy Layer Style. That whole grouping of effects of bevel and emboss and drop shadow and everything else in that list are collectively known as layer styles. So I'll choose Copy Layer Style. I'll then select the other layers that are here. I'll right-click on any one of them and choose Paste Layer Style. And that's gonna apply the same bevel and emboss to all the others, but you notice that it treated them all as individual elements where the bevel and emboss applied to one is, in general, independent of the others. I'm gonna chose Undo, and let me show you how that could be different. I can take that bevel and emboss, and I'm actually gonna drag it to the group itself. When I apply it to the group itself, it acts as if all the layers contained within the group have been merged together into one piece before that effect has been applied. And therefore, the end result looks different. It looks as if those pieces were not on individual layers. Instead, they were on a single layer. And so you should just be aware that if you want to work with layer styles and add things like drop shadows and bevel and embossess, and you want it to happen to more than one layer at a time, consider putting your layers inside of a group and then applying the layer style to the group itself. And oftentimes what I'm doing there is it will be a drop shadow that I'm applying, and it just happens to be out of a object that's made out of more than one layer. And that ends up working out nicely.
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