Learn How to Use Photoshop Elements

Lesson Info

Add Layer Style to Image

And if we wanna get fancy, we can add a drop shadow to this because obviously we want to go for realism here. The drop shadows as we saw yesterday are found under the Styles panel. So I'll click the Styles and from the Styles panel we have sub-collections, so all the different styles are grouped. So what we're looking for if I wanted to add a drop shadow, it would be this one right here - drop shadows - and these are the different presets. Remember we can edit these so I'm just gonna, I usually just reach for this guy down here; this is the soft edge drop shadow. So I'll just double-click that to apply it and you can barely tell that it's been added down there. If I wanna change it, I can click the little gear icon right here, and maybe I wanna increase the distance a smidge, and increase the size to soften that shadow, and maybe reduce the opacity; that's ridiculous. Okay (chuckles), we'll click okay. But the ridiculousness doesn't end there. We can also add all kinds of things. If I ...

can get my mouse to come back - whoop - there is a whole collection of dress-up shapes, there we go, dress-up shapes in here, oh wait, the Crop tool, there we are. So I mean you can see how like we can put glasses on the cat and actually I should show you one more thing that is handy. Let's go back to this blizzard image and I'm gonna undo what we have here right now by pressing Command or Control + Z to undo that, and I'm gonna click this button that's labeled graphics, and this is great because like right now I was thinking oh, we should put glasses on the cat, but I don't have a file handy that would make a good pattern for the glasses. But Elements has this Graphics tab and there's all kinds of graphics in here including... You can sort them by types so here we're looking at backgrounds, but there's frames, there's graphics, there's more shapes, there's text. I'm actually just gonna look at backgrounds right now and so I'm gonna look through and think, what would make a good texture for if I wanted to add glasses to this cat - oo I like this. So I'm gonna double-click this and it just downloads that graphic and fills my whole paper with it. So now I can repeat the process that we did with the tie with the glasses. So let's do cat glasses I guess right? Get it? So we'll put cat glasses, I'm gonna drag these out something about like this. When I let go, they are cropped, we'll go ahead and commit that, and again with the Move tool, I'm gonna click and drag, and drop that onto the cat. And of course we need to resize it and we need to adjust the angle a little bit, so I'll press Command or Control + T again to bring up the Transform box, and then I'll drag in and hover over here, and we can, oh yeah, wow, I'm pretty, I'm pretty excited about that. We can apply that. Now if we wanna copy and paste the layer style that we added over here too, that drop shadow, we can click back over to the Layers panel for a minute, and we see that because we added that drop shadow to this tie layer - layer one is the tie, layer two is the glasses - if I want to copy this layer style, there's two ways to do it. I can right-click on the bar over here of the layer, and I can choose Copy Layer Style, then I would right-click on this layer and then choose Paste, and that would work. Or if I undo that another option is to hold down the Alt or Option key and just drag the little effects icon, and drop it in place up there.

Class Description

Lessons

1Class Introduction
2Understand How Elements Works
3Importing Images
4Workspace Basics: Organizer
5Workspace Basics: Editor
6Tonal Adjustments in Quick Fix
7Color Adjustments in Quick Fix
8Apply Black & White Filters
9Sharpen an Image
10Fix Red Eye & Pet Eye
11Straighten an Image in Quick Fix
12Explanation of Photoshop Elements
13Basic Cropping in Quick Fix
14Guided Edit Overview
15Guided Edit: Tilt Shift
16Ways to Save Files
17Layers & Simple Selections
18Combine Images with Layers
19How to Use Layer Styles
20Make Selections with Layers
21Make Selection with Lasso
22Compositing with Multiple Images
23Refine Edge Selection on Image
24Use Refine Edge on Images
25Create Gradient in Image
26Gradient Map Differences
27Options for Saving
28Brushes Overview
29Creatively Use Brushes
30How to Change Brush Settings
31Use Shape Tool with Brushes
32Work with Multiple Shape Layers
33Finish Image with Custom Shape Tool
34How to Load Brushes into Elements
35Add Layer Style to Image
36Clip Image to Shape & Use as Template
37Retouching Overview
38How to Use Content-Aware Fill
39How to Use Content-Aware Move Tool
40Spot Healing Brush on Blemishes
41Remove Frown Lines with Retouching
42How to Remove Tattoos
43Remove a Gap in Teeth
44How to Whiten Teeth
45Adjust Facial Features
46Working with Type Overview
47Match Type for Image
48How to Manipulate Type Layers
49Create Postcard with Type
50Add Type on a Path
51Organizing Images in Elements
52Add Keywords to Images
53Smart Tags Overview
54Using Albums in Elements
55Places Workspace Overview
56Use Event Tags on Images
57Timeline for Image Organization
58Recommended Workflow