Useful Photoshop Trick Best Way To Scale Layer Styles

Hi, welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. I'm Jesus Ramirez. In this video, I'm going to show you how to scale layer styles in Photoshop. Knowing how to scale layer styles is really important when you're working with layer styles because if you resize your image, the layer styles will no longer look the same with your design. And let's jump right into the tutorial so that you can see what the problem is and how to fix it. So, we're going to work with this document that contains two layers. We have a background and this text layer with several layer styles. The layer styles and their settings are not really important, but I am going to double click on the stroke so that you can see that we're working with a 20 pixel stroke. And that's going to help me explain what the problem is. So, with this text layer selected, I'm going to click on the move tool and I'm going to show you one way of duplicating layers. With the move tool selected, you can hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click and drag to duplicate that layer. So, now I have two S's. On the second S that I just duplicated, I'm going to press Ctrl T, Command T to transform, and I'm going to scale this layer down by 50%. So, I'll just type 50% in the width input box in the options bar. Then I'll click on the check mark to commit the changes. And look at the difference between the two layers. The layer styles on the smaller S look very different than the one on the right. And that's because Photoshop doesn't scale the layer styles when you scale a layer. So, if I double click on stroke, you'll see that I'm still working with a 20 pixel stroke. So obviously, a 20 pixel stroke is going to look very different on a smaller S than on a larger S. So, that's the problem. You design something, you scale it, but it no longer looks the same. So, what do you do to make it look the same? And what you need to do is also scale the layer styles. And you can scale a layer style very, very easy. All you need to do is right click on the FX icon for the layer style, and you'll get this menu. Make sure that you actually click on the FX icon, because if you click somewhere else, you're going to get a different menu. So, right click, right on the FX icon, and select scale effects. And that's going to bring up this window that is going to allow you to scale the effect. Make sure that the preview checkbox is enabled, and you can type in a number or use the slider to scale the effect. But if we type in 50%, you'll notice that we get exactly the same result we had before. I'll press OK, and I've scaled the effect. If I bring up the stroke layer style, you'll see now that it's 10 pixels. I'll press cancel to close the window, and I'll now show you one more thing about scaling layer styles. And what I'll do now is, I'm simply going to delete this layer, because we don't need it anymore, and we'll just work with the original S. And what I'm going to do is go into image, image size, and I'm going to reduce the size of this document to 50%. And then I'll press OK. OK, and I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen, and you'll notice that the text layer and the layer styles were both scaled down to 50%. And the reason that that happened is because in the image size dialog box, we have this option here in the gear icon, which is scale layer styles. See that? So, that has a check mark next to it. That means that when you resize a document, then you'll also resize the layer styles. If I uncheck this, and I change it to 50% once again, and press OK, you'll notice now that the layer styles do not scale with the document. So, just remember that next time you do an image size adjustment, and you want to scale the layer styles, make sure that you have a check mark right next to the scale layer styles option. If you like this technique, click on that like button now, and let me know in the comments if you enjoyed it. Also, if you want to learn more about layer styles and creating text effects, then check out my Black Panther text effect tutorial. You'll learn a ton about how to work with layer styles and text in that video. I highly recommend it. I'll place a link right below in the description so that you can check it out. And if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons so that you don't miss any new tutorials. Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again in the next video.