Photoshop blending options give your images and text some extra impact. Drop shadows, gradients, outlines, bevels and more will give your graphics that professional look you are striving for. Below I’ll be explaining the, “Blending Options”, Pallet in Photoshop.

First off to get to the, “Blending Options”, pallet right click on the layer you wish to apply effects to. You’ll get a list of options. Blending options is the second in that list.

Drop Shadow

Yep you guessed it…the drop shadow option adds a shadow to your image or text. This effect makes your images jump off the page and give them the illusion of depth. I use this effect all the time in conjunction with, “stroke”, when making images for my site.

Inner Shadow

Again this effect lives up to it’s name inner shadow also helps give your text a realer 3dimensional quality.

Outer Glow

Outer glow has many different applications. By adjusting the spread and opacity you can create a nice haloed effect that works well for putting behind cut out images giving them more impact. If you keep the size of the glow small you can make your text or images larger and more pronounced.

Inner Glow

Normally you wouldn’t use all these effects together as your project would get far too busy, but for the sake of this tutorial you will at least get the idea of what each option can do. I like to use the inner glow sparingly mostly on text to give my graphics more impact.

Bevel And Emboss

This effect is by far way to over-used by Photoshop newbies. The, “Bevel and Emboss”, option gives your graphics a sense of roundedness. Used sparingly this effect can be quite elegant, but like I said before is the downfall of many new designers. Play with the opacity and light angle to get the effect that is right for you.

Color Overlay

The color overlay is an option I use the least, but can be handy on occasion especially when working with shapes. Color overlay will replace your shape with what ever color you choose while maintaining other blending effects.

Gradient Overlay

This is a neat looking effect. It applies well to text, but will work with images as well. Gradients can be altered by toggling through the colors and slider at the bottom.

Pattern Overlay

This is one I personally don’t use that often, but can produce some interesting effects. Photoshop has some prefabbed patterns you can use or if you feel so inclined you can import your own through the pattern manager arrow on the side of the pattern box.

Stroke

I use this one all the time. With the, “Stroke”, option you can put a defined line around any image or text. This is the other option I use when building graphics for my site. It provides a defined edge around your content.

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If you’ve never used blending effects in Photoshop you really need to hop on board. Blending effects can be particularly handy when creating the same effect over and over. This is especially beneficial when making graphics for a website that holds a set standard. Save a psd with layer effects applied to it and you can re-create the same look and feel time and time again without re-inventing the wheel.

Today we’ll be adding effects to textual graphics.

1. First off create a new text layer with a font of your choosing. I’m using my standard site font, “Dirty Ego“.

2. Blending Options Palette: Open the blending options palette. To do this right click on the layer you wish to apply effects to and select, “Blending Options”. This will open the palette up. Here you will have a number of effects to play with.

3. Drop Shadow: Select drop shadow from the blending options palette. You can keep the default settings where they are, but I find I like just a touch less of a drop shadow on my graphics. So I have the distance and size turned down from 5’s to 3’s.

4. Stroke: Select stroke from the same palette Here you will have the option to choose your outline color as well as thickness. By default it’s set to 3 pts red, but simply click on the color box to select a new color and reduce the line size in the same palette.

5. Inner Glow: Again in the blending options palette make your effect selections. Choose Inner Glow. By default the color is set to #ffffbe, but once again you can choose what ever color you wish to choose from the color palette. Select, “Blend Mode”, at the top to get a more controlled inner glow effect. Choose Normal instead of Screen.

Before

After

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