Photoshop 5 Effects - Short, and Sweet

This is going to be short and sweet. Why? Because it can be! The Photoshop 5 Layer Effects are a quick and easy way to enhance your computer graphics, and they take no time at all to master. Far more than a set of filters, the effects dynamically 'cover' any layer, updating automatically as the layer changes. Let's have a look.

A few die-hard fans of the popular Alien Skin Eye Candy filters have dismissed the Photoshop Effects as a rip-off of its most popular filters, particularly the drop-shadow and carve filter (which allows beveling effects). However, these individuals fail to realize two things: first, the effects are not filters, in that filters do not automatically update when a layer is changed, and two, the Eye Candy Carve filter and the Photoshop Bevel Effect are entirely different. Here's why.

Everyone knows that it is fun to bevel text. In the old days, the only way to bevel text in Photoshop was to use channels and complex light rendering effects, and indeed, this method still produces the best beveling and is preferred by most professionals. However, with the advent of filters, anyone with a few bucks to spend can give their text a sleek-looking bevel in two seconds flat, which is why text like this is showing up all over the web:

This was accomplished with the Photoshop bevel effects, but a similar look could have been achieved with Eye Candy's Carve filter, or KPT 5's ShapeShifter filter. However, the cool thing about Photoshop effects are that if I decided to add an exclamation point to the above text, the exclamation would automatically be updated with the bevel and drop shadow, provided that it was part of the "effected" layer.

Here's an example of dynamic effects updating in action. Imagine I want to create a slice of Swiss cheese. The first thing I do is create a rectangular selection in a new layer, and fill it with a cheesy color (if I wanted to be fancy I could fill it with a gradient, but I don't want to be fancy.) I now have something that looks like this:

And now a few enhancements with the effects filter - a drop shadow and a shallow, sharpened bevel to give it some dimension. It looks like a slice of American cheese now, doesn't it?

And now my favorite part... an application of the elliptical marquee followed by a delete, and a 'hole' appears in the cheese. But what's this? Unlike an ordinary, "filtered" layer, the layer automatically updates with the effect information. The edges of the hole are beveled, and the shadow of the cheese can be seen. A few more creatively placed holes yields this, a finished slice of Swiss cheese:

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