Quick note: If you choose to use the background layer rather than creating a new one...Unlock the background layer by renaming it, be sure to erase all the color that's there before you start painting your design. If you don't, you'll have a solid image of gold when you apply the style, because the style gets applied to all paint of any color on that layer.

Layer styles are one of the most effective creative tools in Photoshop and I use them a lot in my work. this is an excellent guide for anyone unfamiliar with them. thanks for taking the time to create and post this.

Thanks Nathan :)

Ahh, so that's how you do all your pretty gold lace >_^
Thanks Nathan, I'll be trying this one out very soon! :]

Will this work with Elements 3??

Thank you. Be sure to try some of the other styles that come with Photoshop. The styles palette has a drop-down menu with many lists of styles you can browse through. But the most important thing is that you can create your own combinations of styles that can give almost any look you want to a layer. That's the power of it.

Hi Ann. I have Photoshop Elements 3 installed on computers in my lab. It comes with many "canned" styles which you can apply, but I can't see any way to add or create my own style in it. I think you'll need the full version of Photoshop to create your own styles. If I'm wrong here, someone please let me know.

Another note: When you've defined a new style by dragging the effects list from the layers palette to the styles palette, that style is available to any new file you create in Photoshop. In essence, you're building your own library of styles which you can use anytime you want. You can even share the styles with other Photoshop users by sharing the .asl files in the Adobe Photoshop -> Presets -> Styles folder.

Exellent work Nathan and thx for charing.

I knew it :)

Also, you can try doing the exact same thing on a completely transparent layer and then after you do the blending options, paint on it with the paintbrush tool. It can make some interesting effects

Blessed are the TutorialMakers

also ... The DonutMakers

in this age of downsizing you have to share the limelight

Never occured to me to use more than two colors on the gradient bar, and I'm a fractal artist. lol

You can have as many colors as you'd like. That can create some really beautiful gradients. For example take a look at the desert sunrise and sunset desktop drawings in my gallery.

I don't even have Photoshop but I find this helpful. It applies to almost any program that lets you work with gradients and layers. I know just from looking at this that I can use this tutorial in Paint Shop Pro and GIMP... prolly some others I can't think of at the moment. Thanks for sharing :D

Just as a note - In Elements - you can modify the 'canned' layer styles once you have applied them in much the same way as you can tweak them initially in the full Photoshop.

i will have to try this out sometime! thankx for sharing have a great day! (^_^)

I have never messed with this stuff, so I saved it and when I have time I hope to learn something new. Thank You, for sharing the information.

You're welcome, my friends. I've learned so much from the Caedes community, it's nice to give something back. Phil, thanks for the heads up on Photoshop Elements 3. I'll play around with it some more.

Thanks for the tutorial. I love using the layer styles on mutliple layers with varying transparencies.

Nathan THANKS very much.

How I missed this, I don't know, by I want to thank you so much for putting this together, Nathan! This is wonderful!
Wen

Oh my gosh Nathan, thanks sooooooo much for posting this. I've always wondered how you got such interesting and beautiful styles in your work.

You're welcome. Glad to share with you.

Wow, Now I will have to find a babysitter so that I can play with this! I've never worked with layers and this looks like it may take a few to get the jist of it! Thanks for all your hard work!

Hi Nathan
Thank you for a flawless and relatively straightforward tutorial.
I am an Elements user so I was glad to hear from Phil that it is capable of creating styles.
I am not yet familiar with styles but have a good understanding of layers and how they interact and I am learning more as we speak.
Best Wishes

I just realized what I was doing wrong...I had not set the gloss contour correctly. Made it look really flat. Just in case anyone else missed that little detail :)

The more ups and downs in the gloss contour curve, the shinier it gets (to a point). :)

I notice somebody mentioned using this tutorial in gimp and would be grateful for any hints. I've been trying to "translate" it but am having trouble getting it working right. Unless I'm missing something, gimp does not have layer styles in the same sense, so I'm not sure how to interpret all of the instructions especially since I don't know the default settings for things in Photoshop. I'm guessing they are not all the same as in gimp.

I was also trying to automate it using script-fu. Since I've never used script-fu before, I'm not surprised that hasn't yielded very good results. I'm just staggered that yielded results at all. My script worked OK on my test drawing (not great, but OK) but doesn't seem to work as well on other examples. Do layer styles in Photoshop adapt or do you tweak the settings as appropriate? Right now my script lets me choose any gradient, but I'm wondering if I need to set it up to allow other sorts of flexibility (which would not be "single click" obviously).

If I could figure out how to apply the process properly manually, though, I would be fairly happy - a script can always come later.

Thanks for the pointers in this, in any case, and especially thanks for the jewels tutorial. I don't think my jewels look quite right either, but that tutorial "translates" fairly easily into gimp, so I think their flaws are simply my ineptitude...

- cfr

Hi!

Thanks for the tutorial!

From,
Calmagical

I'm a GIMP user too, and after reading this I went scouring the web for tools which could be used to make these effects, and here they are!

http://registry.gimp.org/node/186