100 Styles 1 + 2 - Black and White - Text Effect with background

Text effect with background

As you may guess from the title this is the first of what will (hopefully) be a 100 posts where I experiment and showcase different effects you can create with Photoshop Layer Styles. I want to do this both to challenge myself and to provide something for others to be inspired by and learn from. The former will be achieved by me trying something new in each "stylistic experiment", and the latter will at least be helped by me posting screenshots of the settings used - as well as providing the style files for anyone interested to download and check out and experiment with.

My plan is to do one each week day until I'm finished, which means that unless something unexpected happens you can expect five per week (each week on a different theme) the coming 20 weeks. I'm going to start off by somewhat breaking that order and post two styles today (as it's technically the second day of the week even though I still haven't gone to bed the first), but in general that's how things will be.

Text Effect
So, let's move on from the introduction and start the actual post. This weeks theme is going to be a fairly simple one: Black and White. Let's start with the text effect, it's a fairly straight-forward, but it showcases a way to get a "double stroke" by using the Outer Glow effect. It should work fine without edits for most light text colors, but the Gradient Overlay will have to be edited to get a similar look on a darker/less saturated text color. Here are the settings:

Nothing special here, just a normal 2 px black stroke

 The gradient overlay is just to add some more interest to the inner area of the text

Here's where the magic happens, by making the Outer Glow Size a few pixels wider than the stroke and the Spread 100% as well as 100% Opacity you get the appearance of having two strokes.

Background
The main character of the background is actually the Satin effect, with a basic Gradient Overlay to keep it in check. Here are the settings:

 Very basic Gradient Overlay just to tone back the effect a bit

And here's the interesting bit, the Satin effect, the main ingredients are the Size (which in this case effects the shape of the lines) as well as the Contour (here I'm using the Ring - Double, but feel free to experiment with the other defaults as well as your own custom ones for other effects). The Angle and Distance are used to position the effect where I want it.

Notes:

• The styles was created for an image with the dimensions: 1024px*768px, and (for the text effect) with a text size of 71pt, if the size of your image/text differs a lot from the above you may have to edit the style to get a similar effect to the example image.

--> Download the styles <--

(See my guide How to load a custom style into Photoshop for more info on how to load styles into Photoshop in case you don't know how to do it already.)