Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to save, load and reuse layer styles!

Photoshop's layer styles are a great way to create fun and interesting photo effects and text effects without requiring a lot of effort, or even a lot of skill. You don't need to be a Photoshop guru or spend your life studying light and color theory to begin applying drop shadows, strokes, gradients, patterns, inner and outer glows and more to your images with layer styles, creating everything from subtle color effects to the wildest and craziest text effects anyone's ever seen. In fact, the only thing you really need to benefit from layer styles in Photoshop is a willingness to play around and experiment. That, plus it also helps to have some free time on your hands, since layer styles can become a bit of an addiction.

If free time is in short supply, not to worry. Photoshop makes it easy to save our layer style creations so we can easily re-apply them to other images without having to redo any of the steps! In this tutorial, to give us something to work with, we're going to be creating a simple photo frame using nothing but layer styles. When we're done, we're going to save the completed effect, and then we'll see how to apply the exact same photo frame to a different image instantly!

Here's the photo frame we'll be creating:

Keep in mind that the photo frame itself is not the main focus of this tutorial, although you're certainly free to follow along with the steps and use the completed frame with your images. The point of the tutorial, though, is to learn how easy it is to save your own layer style effects, load them back into Photoshop when needed and then apply them instantly to other images.

Let's get started!

Want an easier way to follow along with our tutorials? Download them as printable PDFs!

Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With our photo newly opened in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do before we can begin adding any layer styles to it is duplicate the Background layer. If we look in our Layers palette, we can see that we currently have one layer and it's named Background. This is the layer that contains our original photo. We usually duplicate this layer before doing anything else so we don't harm our original pixel information, but in this case, there' a different reason. Photoshop doesn't allow us to apply layer styles to Background layers. In fact, if you look at the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, you'll see that it's currently grayed out and unavailable:

Let's get around this little problem by creating a copy of the Background layer. Go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy:

Or, for a much faster way to duplicate a layer, simply press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). If we look again at our Layers palette, we can see that we now have an identical copy of the Background layer sitting above the original. Photoshop has automatically named the copy "Layer 1":

Now that we have a copy of the Background layer to work with, we can begin adding our layer styles!

Step 2: Apply A Black Stroke To The Layer

As I mentioned at the beginning, we're going to be creating a simple photo frame using nothing but layer styles, and the first thing we'll do is create a black border around the edges of the photo. Click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (which is now available to us) and select Stroke from the bottom of the list of layer styles that appears:

This brings up Photoshop's rather large Layer Style dialog box set to the Stroke options in the middle column. The first thing we want to change is the stroke's color. For some reason, the folks at Adobe set the default stroke color to red. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted red for my stroke color, but no matter. We can easily change it. We're going to use black for our stroke color, so click on the color swatch to the right of the word Color:

This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker. Select black for the stroke color. If you're not sure how to use the Color Picker, simply enter a value of 0 for the R, G and B options, circled in red. This will select black. Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Color Picker:

With the stroke color now set to black, change the Position option to Inside. This will place the entire stroke within the boundaries of our image. Then, to adjust the thickness of the stroke, drag the Size slider. Dragging the slider to the right increases the size of the stroke, while dragging it to the left decreases the stroke size. The value you end up choosing will depend on the size of the photo you're using, as well as how thick you want your frame to appear, so keep an eye on your image in the document window as you drag the slider. For my photo, I'm going to go with a value of 60 px (pixels) for my stroke size:

When you're done, your photo should have a black border around the inside edges:

Don't click out of the Layer Style dialog box just yet. We still have a couple more layer styles to add before our photo frame is complete.

Go to page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4