Here’s the latest Photoshop tutorial from my collection.

I’ve also prepared a written transcript for those who find that easier to follow.

I want to show you a little bit about working with some of the layer properties in Photoshop. The first thing I’m going to do is to show you how these shapes that I’ve created are done. Basically, once you create your shape tool you can use any of these options up here – depending on the type of layer or shape that you want to create. And this particular icon up here – if you roll-over it says “Shape Layers” – it’s going to create a shape on a brand new layer. So anytime I use that tool over here on my layers palette it makes a new layer for that particular shape. So if I change this to green and then I create another shape you’ll see that I have a green layer.

The nice thing about these is that I can scroll through each one of these layers and decide to change the color just by clicking in this box here, and then I can click and move these around. Because if you use this other tool you can only create shapes on the current layer – so if I create a new shape it’s going to create it on the same background layer. So I’m going to work with these three layers – the green, dark red and brighter red colors. I would recommend that you turn on auto-select, which allows you to switch very quickly between layers – it automatically selects the layer, whereas if I have that disabled it will only move the currently selected layer, in my case the bright green layer, and I would then need to use the layers menu to select the current layer before moving a particular layer. If you don’t have auto-select enabled then you can use CTRL on your keyboard to enable auto-select temporarily, for as long as you have the CTRL key pressed.

Moving on, the next thing I want to show you is that if you double click in this blue area you will get the layer styles dialog. This is an extra menu that will allow you to do extra things like inner glow, drop shadow etc – and you can do some really cool 3D effects with this specific tool – especially when you get in to using some other shapes you can use it to create some inner glows, like this. It’s also really cool when you’re trying to design buttons for the internet, or any icons for a website you can use this to quickly create button type effects. You can also do a color overlay pretty easily to change up the color. And the nice thing is that you have all your blending modes right within this palette, so if you want to mix some of the colors – e.g. this purple with the existing color you can use the different modes to switch between and change the opacity. You can do the same thing with the gradient overlays, if you want to do a quick gradient on one of the buttons you can do that as well – you have various options: linear, radial, reflected gradients. And by clicking the color you get this option menu where there are some preset gradients, and you use this little arrow to load some additional gradients that photoshop have – you can either append to the current list or just hit okay to replace the existing list of gradient types. So once you select a gradient that you like you can use the scale to change the size of the gradient up or down – if you want to leave the existing color underneath you can change the blend mode to something else, so that original green color that I had is still there – I’m just applying this metallic look to it.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. Play around with all those blending modes, the shape layers and auto-select, and see what works best for you. Thanks for watching.