Shapes & Styles Redux

Another small batch of tips for those that are knee deep in creating graphics through custom shapes and layer styles.

Shine a Light on the Subject
In lighting sometimes you want something to appear as if it’s being lit from a single source. A linear gradient overlay can do this but it gives a uniform look to the object. Simply switching the gradient from linear to radial focuses the light in a particular area. If you’d like the object to look like it’s being lit from a direction, click on the object while the gradient overlay palette is still open. You can move around the gradient focus to your whim. Increasing the scale of the gradient helps the effect as well.
Forcing a Gradient to Behave
The gradient style in Photoshop will give you some options to fake a lighting pattern but it’s limited to the dimensions to your shape. Technically. Very simply, zoom out till you see a view of your canvas, then hold down shift to add another shape to the layer outside the viewable artwork area. The gradient will follow the new size of the shape allowing you to making more subtle fine tuning of the effect. This usually only applies to very small or very large shapes.

Dashed Strokes in Photoshop
Photoshop doesn’t yet offer the stroke options of Illustrator or InDesign but a quick dashed line in Photoshop is very easily produced. First simple make a 2x2 pixel image and fill each two opposing corners with a pixel. The define this as a pattern (edit > define pattern). Draw out a vector box and choose stroke as a layer style. Change the stroke fill type to pattern and choose your created pattern. You may need to nudge the stroke width or box itself to line up the dashes correctly but it’s handy for quick and dirty resizing of dashed boxes.

When is a Stroke not a Stroke
When it’s an Outer glow. For fine tuning a soft edge consider using an outer glow with a tight radius.Overlay a few of them to strengthen the edge. The look will be very close to a normal stroke but with a slighty softer look.

Mixing and Matching
While there are some limitations to working with layer effects, most of the time you can recreate some nice effects with judicious use of the gradient tool. Clicking on the gradient bar in the gradient overlay menu will give you the option to change the gradient type. The option "Noise" which can create some nice random effects if it is set to random and you restrict the colours. At the moment you can’t reorder the way the effects are stacked but you can create a transparent copy with just one effect if you want to overlay a pattern etc on top of a shape.

Photoshop CS2 and Layer Styles
I treated myself to a crisp new copy of Creative Suite 2 to take advantage of a few new features. Illustrator CS 2 and InDesign CS2 have proven themselves to be workhorses. However Photoshop CS 2 sits forlornly in the corner, mostly unused. The reason? There is a noticeable lag opening and operating the layer styles palette making this method of working fairly frustrating compared to CS 1 and earlier.

Clearing out large pattern textures and custom shape libraries is recommended but doesn’t seem to entirely fix the issue.This appears to be quite a common problem even with 1.5gb ram on a decent processor. So this is a warning rather than a tip.

[Credit] Robot Icon from Startly Software’s Trans Lucy 2