[Developer]

Lesson : Introduction 5 - Layer Styles 2

Part Two
Continuing on from Part One, in this tutorial, we will look at other Layer Styles that PhotoShop has to offer. We will create a new document for this tutorial, and will apply styles to different layers.
Download the .PSD here
First, we will start with a blank canvas of size 400x300 pixels. Then we import two pictures that we will be using, that we can apply styles to.

We will position the slug where we want it, and then open it's Layer Styles window. We will want to add a drop shadow, to make it pop out of the image slightly, and give it a bit of depth. We want to make it look as though it is crawling on the screen. Add a Drop Shadow with Distance 3px, and Size 3px.

Click to enlarge.
Once we have done this, we can add some text to our compsition, and bring up the Layer Styles for it Click on the Stroke style. This will add a border to the text. The default value is 3 pixels, so this might be too much; change it to 1 or 2, and change the color to black. Now choose the Color Overlay style and choose the color White. This style overlays the layer's entire contents with a solid color - or you can choose the Pattern or Gradient Overlay to overlay everything with a pattern or gradient.
We should now have something like this:

Click to enlarge.
To give the monitor more of a 3D look, we will open up the Layer Styles window for the Monitor layer and then choose the Bevel and Emboss style. Notice that this style has two options underneath it: Contour, and Texture; which we can choose to set or not set. The settings for the Bevel and Emboss style are plentiful. We are provided with a host of options for this one style. We will stick with the Inner Bevel, but you can choose the other options to see what they look like, and how they're different.
We will also leave the technique as smooth, but again, see what Chisel Hard and Chisel Soft do. We will set the Soften to 5px, and you can play around with all the settings to get comfortable, as that is the best way of learning PhotoShop. If we then check the Contour style beneath Bevel and Emboss, we will be presented with a few different options to choose what the contour of the bevel uses. We will use the bottom-left, curved one:

The texture option is similar to the Pattern Overlay - it will texturize our layer with a texture we choose. You can experiment with this, but we won't be applying it. Click Ok when done, we should have this:

Notice that the monitor has more of a 3D look to it, around the edges.
Finally, we will add a Layer Style to the background (white is just a blank, white color). Open up the Layer Styles of the bg layer and choose the Gradient Overlay option. Click the currently selected gradient and make your own, or select one from the list. For this example, we used the following:

As a finishing touch, we will duplicate the monitor layer, rotate it, flip it horiztonally, use Edit > Transform > Perspective to line it up like a reflection, reduce the layer's opacity and reposition it like so:

We can also do the same to the text layer, but we should rasterize the text (by right-clicking the layer), and also apply the layer styles. We can do this by creating a new layer below the rasterized text layer and then pressing Ctrl+E. This will merge the rasterized text layer with the blank layer and the layer styles will be applied - note, though, that they will no longer be editable.

Download the .PSD here