Tips about Styles (Blending options)

Blending options give you powerful tool for fine effect tuning of your design elements. In this article I’ll write about usage of every particular blending option with examples.

Drop Shadow:- Adds a shadow that falls behind the contents on the layer. This effect is used very often on standard way and it’s time passed. If you want to use it, find your own original way. I prefer distance 0 or 1px instead of very common 5px (Photoshop’s default), and smaller opacity. Dropping small shadow is ideal for layouts border:

Here you can see how smaller distance and opacity of shadow looks more sophisticated. Also, third example shows how Drop shadow can be used for button creation in mix with other blending options.

Mixing various blending options can produce interesting button effects like this:

Inner Shadow:- Adds a shadow that falls just inside the edges of the layer’s content, giving the layer a recessed appearance. This is main usage, but, some cool button effect may be created putting it to distance 0 and angle to 90 decreases, as shown on last image. In combination with gray gradient fill and inner glow may produce chrome effect:

Outer Glow and Inner Glow:- Add glows that emanate from the outside or inside edges of the layer’s content. Outer glow is usable way to spotlight shape on background, but, as outer glow is very often used, try to avoid most common settings:

Inner glow has wider usage in mixture with other blending options which are as follows.

Bevel and Emboss:- Add various combinations of highlights and shadows to a layer. Standard settings for these are looking very old-fashioned and remind you on beginnings of world wide web. I prefer opx size and contour option set. It is usable in web header and navigation menu design as item divider:

Satin:- This applies interior shading that creates a satiny finish. It is usable sometimes but in my opinion only at very small opacities because it gives so much darkness.

Color, Gradient, and Pattern Overlay:- It fills the layer's content with a color, gradient, or pattern. Color overlay is less usable but if you make rollover effects in Image-Ready it can help you to make color change of some text or button element which is easily restorable. Gradient overlay is most used Blending option because it makes detailed from simple surfaces.

This effect is made with Gradient overlay, Pattern overlay and one transparent layer (10% of opacity) over it.

Pattern Overlay Fill:- It is a usable option and very common on popular web templates. Use it with small opacity as detail booster in combination with Gradient overlay.

Stroke:- It outlines the object on the current layer using color, a gradient, or a pattern. It is particularly useful on hard-edged shapes such as type and on some illustrations.