Learning Special Effects

Before we get started, I’d like to point out to any users of Photoshop 5.0 or later that Effects in Photoshop Elements are not layer effects. They are pre-packaged actions that come with the program (Elements does not have an Actions palette).

By watching how effects/actions do what they do, you can learn a great deal about how to use Elements creatively on your own.

In this tutorial, I’m going to make you work a little bit. To see the results, you’ll have to apply the effects. I’m not going to show them to you. I will translate for you, and tell you exactly what to do, but you’ll want to be looking at your Elements window as you read along.

Click the color square in the toolbar, and pick a light color other than white. Click OK to exit the Color Picker, and the press Alt-Backspace to fill your document with the new color.

Choose the elliptical marquee tool in the toolbar, and drag to create a small circle, about two inches in diameter near the center of your image. Pressing the Shift key as you drag will cause your shape to be a perfect circle.

Click the color box again to go to the Color Picker again and this time pick a medium to dark color that will contrast with your first, light color. Click OK to exit the Color Picker, and then press Alt-Backspace to fill your elliptical selection with the new, darker color. Press Ctrl-D, or choose Select > Deselect to deselect your shape.

All we’re doing is creating a test document that is small enough to run the many steps in each effect easily, and rapidly. There’s no need for any fancy image to see what we are going to be looking at.

Next, choose Edit > Preferences, and in General preferences, at the top, right side of the box, reset your History States number to 40. You’ll need to remember to reset this back to 20, or whatever you normally have it set for, when you’re finished. I’ll remind you at the end. Adding History states is very memory intensive, so you don’t want to keep that set to more than you need.

Do the same with the History palette. Drag it out of the palette well, and extend its length. This time, I want you to make the palette as tall as your window will permit. I put the top of the palette all the way up on my Elements title bar, and dragged the bottom of the palette to be at the bottom of the window, on the status bar.

Place both these palettes on the right side of your screen. Put the Layers palette on the outside, and the History palette on the inside. Your open document should be in the center of the screen.

Last, grab the Effects Browser and drag it out of the palette well. Place it on the left side of the window

There are two little icons at the bottom of the Effects Browser palette. Click on the one on the left to change your view from Thumbs, to List View.

In the palette menu, choose All to include all of the effects in your list.

If you will look at the illustration above, you’ll notice that some of the effects have the word (type) next to them. These effects require that you have a type layer selected in the Layers palette before you can apply the effect.

When you go to try those effects, select the type tool in the toolbar, pick Verdana as your font (or Helvetica if you prefer), Bold, type 50 in the size box, and pick black for your color. Actually, type anything you like. Just be sure and make it big. Effects won’t show up well on small type.

I didn’t save my type layer since it got in the way when looking at the results of effects that didn’t require type. It’s very simple to add the type layer again each time you need it.

You don’t want to use this command, normally. If you’re running low on memory, it is a way to free some up in an emergency, but otherwise, I can’t imagine you’d want to give up your Undo capability.

However, for the purposes of this tutorial, it’s much easier to keep the History palette clean. I used this step repeatedly as I was testing out the effects. I’d recommend that you do so, too. After you’ve had a look at an effect, click on the first effect at the top of the palette, and clear you states, again.

You should be ready to get started. I’m going to show you the Asphalt effect first, and then jump to the Brushed Metal effect, because it happens to include several steps that require a fair amount of explanation.

Choose the Asphalt effect in the Effects Browser, and click on the Apply button in the palette’s upper right corner.

When Elements is finished applying the effect, you will be asked, in an alert box, “Do you wish to keep this effect?”.

Before clicking “Yes”, I want you to look at your History palette. Notice that, at the very top of the palette, there is a Snapshot.

This is a Photoshop feature that is not accessible in Elements. It allows you to “save” a particular history state for as long as your document is open.

Normally, when you exceed the number of history states that you have specified in preferences, the oldest states are discarded. By creating a snapshot, Elements is making sure that it can return you to where you started from if you decide not to keep the effect.

Go ahead and click “Yes” to accept the effect. Now, go to your History palette, scroll up the list of states to the top, and click on the first step before the start of the Asphalt effect. In this case, that would be the state right before New Layer.

In all cases, when we are walking through these effects I want you to watch 1) the Layers palette, and don’t forget to check for Blend Mode and Opacity changes, and 2) your image.

The next four states, Mezzotint, Add Noise, Texturizer, and Gaussian Blur are all filters. Watch your image as you click on each successive state to see what the filter is doing to the image.

Just in case you’re looking at your totally blotted out image, and wondering what the heck this is for, the Asphalt effect is from the Textures group, and is intended for filling suitable objects with a particular texture.

When stepping through these history states, unless you are a veteran Photoshop user, you are not going to recognize many of the names. I have made an Appendix with an alphabetized list of all the state names found in Effects, accompanied by the path to where you can find the commands in Elements. See the Appendix page, whenever you need help.

You can walk backward, and forward through your History palette as many times as you like, or need, in order to understand what was going on. You can also turn off the visibility of layers in the Layers palette by clicking on the eyeball icon at the left side of a layer, in order to try and see what’s on another layer.

However, and please remember this, the minute you use any tools, or commands, or change the Blend Mode, or layer Opacity, this constitutes a new history state, and all subsequent states will be deleted.

Of course, you can simply go back to the beginning, and run the effect again, but do be aware that you can’t add new edits to the image and still be able to see edits in a different direction.

Now that you’ve walked all the way through the Asphalt effect, I want to have you look a little closer at one of the states that may have puzzled you. When it added that Cloud filter to the new layer, you could barely see any change. And, you can’t look at the layer alone because it’s grouped. If you turn off visibility for the Layer 1 layer with all the black texture, the grouped Cloud layer is automatically turned off, too.

We need to have a closer look. With the Cloud state selected in the History palette, select the Cloud layer (Layer 2) in the Layers palette, and then choose Layer > Ungroup.

Notice that you have now lost the last history state of the effect, Merge Down. This is what I just warned you about. Performing an edit deletes all history states which follow the one you add edits to.

In the Layers palette, turn off visibility for all layers except Layer 2 which is the top layer. Next, with Layer 2 selected, enter 100 in the Opacity text box, or use the slider as shown below. In your image, you can see what the Cloud filter layer looks like.

Now, I want to jump down the list of effects, and do the Brushed Metal effect. It combines several features that I want to talk about, so we’ll do it next.

You do need to step back before the Asphalt effect, to undo it and start with a clean image. If you ever get confused about which state was before an effect, or if your image gets changed in a way that you can’t seem to undo, close your image without saving, and reopen it. History states are not saved, so you’ll have a clean History palette when you reopen.

The Brushed Metal effect requires text, so select the type tool in the toolbar, and add one word, 50 pt or larger. You need to have your text layer selected in the Layers palette before choosing the Brushed Metal effect, and clicking the Apply button in the Effects Browser.

Make sure you choose Brushed Metal, and not Brushed Aluminum, which is right next to it in the list.

In Elements, the command is called Simplify Layer, and not Rasterize, but you can see what it does by watching your Layers palette as you click on the Rasterize Type state.

The next series of states add a new layer, and then proceed to apply five filters to it. If the filter names are all new to you, please see the Filters Page for help.

Then we come to the Group with Previous command. As promised when we saw this with the previous effect, I’ll explain what it does, this time.

Step back and forth between the Levels state and the Group with Previous state. Can you see what Group with Previous does?

It limits the visibility, and effects of the top layer to those areas that have content in the bottom layer. The boundary of the shape on the bottom layer determines what you see, and don’t see from the layer above.

When it was used in the Asphalt effect, the bottom layer was fully opaque, so the grouping effect was not particularly apparent. It should be much easier for you to see what it’s doing, here.

And, the last state applies a Bevel and Emboss to the type. This is interesting because Elements doesn’t have a bevel and emboss style. You can apply a bevel, or you can apply an emboss, but not both.

You could apply a bevel style, and then use Filter > Stylize > Emboss, but the filters are not removable as are styles.

What you can do, is copy the style from this effect by choosing Layer > Layer Style > Copy Layer Style. To apply it, select a layer (which can be in another document) and choose Layer> Layer Styles > Paste Layer Style.

It may be more convenient for you to save such layer styles in a style library document that you can make.

There’s one more particularly interesting effect that I’ll go through in detail, and then you’ll be on your own.

The next effect we’re going to use, Bricks, is unique in that it creates, and then deletes a new document in order to make a new pattern. Since the new document is not saved, and its history lives and dies with it, we can’t get a look at the history states associated with it. You’ll have to watch closely to see what happens.

Make sure the center of your screen is not covered by any of your palettes. The new document will appear there, and you’ll want to see it, for the brief moment that it exists. Also, make sure you can see your History palette. You’ll catch a glimpse of the states that go into creating the pattern, and then that document’s history will be gone.  

The history states that you do end up with are as follows. Having created, and saved a new pattern in the temporary document, the effect then adds a new layer to your image, and fills it with the pattern (Edit > Fill, choose Pattern from the menu).

The Craquelure texture filter is then applied twice, followed by the Add Noise filter. Here, I’d like to show you a little trick. Press Ctrl-Alt-F to bring up the dialog box of the last filter applied. You can see what filter settings the effect used.

This only works for the last filter applied by an effect, and, if the filter doesn’t have a dialog box (some are simply applied, on click), pressing Ctrl-Alt-F will simply reapply the filter.

The easiest way to access your patterns palette is to go to Edit > Preset Manager and choose Patterns from the menu. You can also find the patterns palette on the options bar of the pattern stamp.

As you can see, below, the effect adds a copy of the brick pattern to your patterns palette each time you apply it. I had a lot of bricks to get rid of.

Note that if the effect name has (selection) next to it, you need to drag a selection somewhere in your image before clicking the Apply button. I used the marquee tool to drag a simple circle each time it was required.

Some of the effects names have (layer) next to them. I have no idea what that indicates. If you figure it out, let me know.

Also note that states called Blending Options may refer to the Layer palette Blend Mode, the Layer palette Opacity setting, or to a kind of blending that is in Photoshop, but not in Elements. Keep your eye on the Layers palette Blend Mode, and Opacity settings, in any case, because I noticed changes there that did not show up as history states.

Whenever you can’t figure out what a state is, use the Appendix to find out. And, when you’re all finished, don’t forget to set your history states back to 20 in Edit > Preferences > General (or whatever you had them set to when we started).

If you’re wondering why I asked you to set the history states all the way up to 40, there are two effects that have 32 states, or 33 if your image needs to be flattened. For example, the Brushed Aluminum effect, shown below.

All that Duplicate Channel, Free Transform stuff followed by four Load Selections is taking place in channels, which you don’t have access to. If you watch your screen while that’s going on, you’ll see that it’s a rather kludgy way to resize the canvas. It turns up in most (all?) of the Frames effects.

You could do it a lot more easily, by hand, or using the technique I show in the Playing With Styles tutorial.

Many of the effects end, as this one does, by flattening the image. I would suggest that you make it a habit to always step back in history to the one step before that, after applying an effect.

Flattening the image loses all your layers, and all your ability to edit those layers. By keeping them intact, you will have many more options to customize the effect, later. You can always flatten the image yourself by choosing Layer > Flatten Image.

If you find any part of an effect that you can’t understand, don’t worry about it. There were several that I couldn’t figure out, either. For example, layers were sometimes added, with no content, and then deleted or merged down. Why?

If you would like to download a zipped pdf file of this tutorial, please click on the link below and save it to your hard drive.
Learning Special Effects pdf
63 KB