How to add a line around the outside of type in Photoshop

Hi everyone, in this video we are going to add Stroke around text and objects. Even, we're going to get bit fancy with double strokes that have patterns in them. All right, let's go and do that now in Photoshop. 

Hi there, to get started you can use the file that we've been working on, or just work with any file. We'll start with adding Stroke to the text, then an object, and doing multiple Strokes, over exciting. We start with the All Stars text. I've got it selected here in my layers, make sure it's this light green. And adding a Stroke around the outside, use this little 'fx', the icon down the bottom, click on, and go to 'Stroke'. It's that easy. Now yours is probably going to look nothing like mine, mine remembers the last thing I did, yours is probably going to be going through it there, black, and like one point. So you might be looking at it and going, "I can't see it." It's a little bit hard to see it, right? So grab the size, crank it up. 

You can see, in my case, it depends on what position yours is set to. I think it's probably by default, set to Center, I think so. So inside, is the inside of the text. You can kind of see, when I get to this size it's all on the inside of the font. Outside and Center. It struggles both sides of the outside of the text. In my case I want outside. I'm going to lower it down a little bit, I'm going to pick a color. Now, you can pick a color from in here. What I'm going to do is, I'm not going to hold anything down, I can just click out here anywhere, and it picks colors from the document. So find something you like, that maybe ties in with the background that's going to work for me. I'm going to click 'OK'. Yes, that's adding stroke to text, click 'OK'. 

So you really like it and you want to do the same thing to this 'C Taylor' here, what you can do is you can right click the layer, so I'm right clicking the word, not the icon or anything else, just the word 'All Stars', right click it. There's this one here that says 'Copy Layer Style'. So that's what these things are called. This little button down the bottom here, it's called Layer Style. All of these are Layer Styles. So right click, and say 'Copy Layer Style'. It has copied it, I can find the C Taylor layer, and right click him, and say, 'Paste Layer Style', and along, he comes for the ride. I don't like that so I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Undo, but that's the way to do that 

Now you can add strokes to anything, we've done it for text but you can do the same thing for objects. So this little rectangle here, I can right click and go to 'Stroke', there's nothing different. I just add a stroke around it. The only thing you might notice is that it's kind of faded out, you're like, "Hmm." Like it should be exactly the same sort of color as this, and the opacity is right up, and it's not the same. It's because we actually lowered the opacity of this rectangle earlier on in a previous course. You might not be following along in order, but all that's happened is--

Let's say I'm going to adjust this to be really big, and pick another color. Click 'OK', what's happening is, see this opacity here on this layer, so the layer selected, the opacity was set to 50, but turn it back to its pure black color, and that stroke comes back to life. Both of those things I hate, so I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Step Backward', 'Edit', 'Step Backward' to get rid of the Stroke. A better example would have been-- earlier on in the course we made these circles here, there's this one, and I made a second one and expanded it out, just so that-- I'd probably do that with an extra stroke around the outside.

Earlier on in the course, I guess we just-- I want you to stick to your current skill-set but now if I was redoing this, I would do a circle with the pink Stroke around. Now let's go a little bit more advanced. So this All Stars Layer here I want to-- I'm going to show you how to add more than one stroke. It's a handy trick, and I'm going to show you some patterns and things. So, with 'All Stars' layer selected I want to edit the Stroke. Let's just say I want to edit it, no double strokes just yet, all you do is double click on this word here called 'Stroke'. Not Effects, double click on 'Stroke'. And I can go in here and just edit it if I like, so that's editing it. Also in here is the chance where I get to add more than one stroke. There's a few of these Layer Styles that allow for an extra version of itself, or as many as you like actually. 

So 'Stroke', 'Inner Shadow' there's a few of them you can have doubles of. So in this case, 'Stroke', I want to hit this '+' plus button, now I have two strokes. Now the trouble is that they're the same size and the same color that don't show over here. And what happens is, it's a Layer Order, like your layers over here. So the one on top gets seen first and covers this one underneath. So if I change the one underneath, watch this, and pick a different color, I'm just going to pick random color. Nothing happens, because it's hiding underneath this top one, which is this more peachy color, but this one underneath, if I make it a bit bigger cool, eh? Kind of pokes out the sides. That's how to add double strokes. 

Now, I'd probably pick something. It's gone bad, yeah, it's okay. I'm going to go a little bit further, double strokes is kind of advanced, but this next bit-- I don't want to blow your brain, but I want to give you, like there's some cool easy enough tricks to do while you're here. If you've made it this far in the video let's go bit further. 

So where it says 'Fill Type'-- we've done 'Color' that's the normal one, 'Gradient', as you imagined it, Gradient, we looked at that in an earlier video. You click on this here to change the colors. Let's look at this one called 'Pattern', it's quite cool. It's quite cool for this particular style here, this kind of like 70s Basketball kind of thing. You can see-- I'm going to zoom in over here, I've got this kind of like lines that run around the outside. And that's coming from this pattern, so you can change this pattern, there's some cool options in here, Straight Lines, Vertical Lines, Horizontal, Squares, Dots. There's lots of things in here. Those top ones are quite cool, all the rest of them, they're a little bit, I wouldn't say lame, lame's a bad word; these are lame. Down here, they get, usable--

So I'm going to go to this one here because I quite like it, you can play around with the Scale, I'm going to make it a bit smaller. What you'll notice is that, remember we had-- this was actually a pink, and what was it, I can't remember, so go back to 'Color'. Yes, it was pink, so it was pink and then I applied this pattern, and it goes white and you're like, "What happened?" It's basically where the pattern, see this pattern here, it's got a black line with a white outside. Now we're not going to go through how to make your own patterns in this video. Basically it's getting the white from this little square here. 

There's a thing we can do to get round that, we can go into the Blend Modes. We've looked at Blend Modes a little bit in the past. We haven't really gone into them hard core, we'll do that later in the course but it's just the way that this pattern is blending with the background. In this case, behind it is this green circle. So at the moment, it's not doing anything, just sitting on top, normally. Dissolve never does anything but then when you start getting into Darken, and Multiply, can you see the different effects that are applying here? So have a little look through which one's going to work for you. In this case, I'm probably just going to go to Multiply. It is really hard to know what they're going to do in these cases because--

It's not you, it's basically the top pattern texture and color mixing with the bottom pattern texture, and color. And because those are always different, well, normally always different, every time you use something like 'Soft Light' you'll be like, "Ah, it's different from the last time I used it." And that's not you, that's just part of Photoshop. Even me, I have to go through and go this painful kind of like, "Let's see what all these will do." It is painful. 'Difference', it's kind of cool. So I'm going to go back to 'Multiply' because that's what I kind of liked. I'm going to scale it down just a tiny bit. Up, big bit. I'm just messing around now. That's okay for me. 

All right everyone, so that is how to create a Layer Style using the Stroke. We've added multiple strokes, and we got even fancy with that Pattern Stroke. Remember, you can copy and paste them by right clicking the layer, going 'Copy', not paste, go and copy, and then pasting it on a different text document, or across document. Say it's a completely different document, open it up, paste it across, and it's a way of keeping consistent strokes and swooshy lines that you've spent some time making.

Let's get into the next video now where we look at Bevel and Emboss. My absolute worst of the Layer Styles but loads of people like them, so we're going to do them together anyway. Let's go.