100 Styles 8 - Gradients - Wood

Wood grain effect (Click the image to see it bigger)

Today it's all about the Inner Glow filter, at least for the main effect, which consists of two shapes, each with an Inner Glow layer style applied to them, one with a gradient and another without. Read on for more info on how it (and the background for that matter) was done as well as to be able to download the style file to experiment with yourself.

100 Styles 6 - Gradients - Ball

3D ball effect created using the gradient overlay effect (Click the image to see it bigger)

This week I'm going to try and answer the question "In how many places can gradients be used in Photoshop Layer Styles?". Though to make it more interesting I'm off course not just going to do it as a list, but try to find more interesting effects than that. Because of that this is probably not going to be the best place to learn the basics of gradients in Photoshop as I intend to try and experiment to do things I didn't know about before. (That said, I'll try to explain things where I can so everyone can at least reproduce the effect, and hopefully learn something in the process as well.) Starting off the week is a way to make a simple circle look like a ball, just using the Gradient Overlay effect (and a stroke around it, but that's just icing on the cake).

100 Styles 5 - Black and White - Chess (Text effect with background)

Checkerboard text effect + background effect (Click the image to see it bigger - I really recommend you do this as it's hard to make out all the details in the tiny preview image above.)

To compensate for being a couple of days late I offer a bonus style for the background in this image, enjoy :) (Though admittedly part of it depends on an effect on the text layer, more on that in a moment.) Now it's not every day you need a checkerboard effect, but I'm going to try and put some useful tips into the description so it's worthwhile even if you're not needing this specific effect.

How to load a custom style into Photoshop

For each post in my new series "100 Styles" I will post the file needed to recreate the styles in that days post, this post describes how to load that file into Photoshop to be able to use it and experiment with the style. The screenshots are from Photoshop CS4, but the process should be more or less the same in older/newer versions. Also, I'm using the Windows version of Photoshop, but as far as I know the only thing that's different on a Mac is that the dialogs look a bit different so that shouldn't make any difference. First download the file to a place that's easy to find, the Desktop is usually a good place (you can delete the file as soon as you've loaded it into Photoshop, so no need to be afraid of cluttering up the Desktop).

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.