Now at this point, this image is still a bit empty and the reason is I have left a lot of sky because I am going to turn this into a sort of movie poster/picture post card that includes a big line of text in the background.

And as it just so happen, thanks to the miracle of video editing. I already have this text created and ready to go.

Notice down here inside the layers pallet, I have this folder called Text and Stuff. This is what makes this particular lesson so difficult to follow along with, do not you know?

But right now, I have got this folder and this folder is called a layered group inside the Photoshop CS2, a slight change in terminology from previous versions. I am going to go ahead and turn on the group and notice what happens. I get this big black word all over my image. Now, I really just wanted to run in the background of my image, and I do not want it to be this prominent either.

So, what am I going to do?

Well, I am going to apply a layer style to this word, and this word for what it is worth, I just drag it on screen so you can see a little better. It happens to say “Shine” all right? We will see it in all of it is splendor in just a moment.

I am going to go ahead and twirl-open the group and click on the shine text layer. So, this is editable text inside Photoshop. Photoshop handles text beautifully as you might imagine, and I am going to click on this little F icon here. This little floor in icon to bring up yet another pop up menu, and I will go ahead and choose the outer glow command in order to bring up the outer glow controls here inside the big old layer style dialog box.

And in outer glow, if you notice back here, the text inside the image window, you can see that it has the slight, ever so slight outline going on. Well, that is no good. We need to increase that size value more like to a value around a 100 pixels. That is pretty good. So, we really have some very shiny letters.

And, I am also going to increase the opacity value so that the outer glow is a little brighter, and this yellow color is just fine. All the other settings are groovy, and at this point, I will go ahead and click the Okay button in order to accept that effect.

Now at this point, you might say “good gravy Dick” I will go ahead and press Shift Tab in order to hide those pallets from view so we can focus on the text a little better.

You might say “good gravy Dick” you did all this work to this background image. You have completely mock it up with this big letters here. They are completely covering up all that background detail. Well, not so. Not necessarily.

So, I can modify the opacity of the letters and the effect independently.

For example, first, I am going to reduce the opacity of the letters without changing the opacity of the text at all. And I did that by reducing the fill value inside the layers pallet, but I did it from the keyboard using Shift 4 for 40% fill opacity.

And do not worry about any of these details. I am just telling you in case you know what that stuff is, just what I am up to. We are going to cover it all in tons and tons of detail later, but I was able to change the opacity of those letters independently of the shiny outer glow effect.

And now, bring down the opacity of both the letters and the layer effect at once by pressing the 6 key for 60% opacity. And this allows us to see through the letters. See, the Stanley Hotel on the background and still be able to read the letters just fine.

So it is the best of both worlds, do not you know?

Now, the next thing I want to do is bring back the mountains a little bit, mask these letters so that the letters are just pumping out above this mountain ridge right here. And to do that, I am going to press Shift Tab once again to bring back the pallets on the right hand side of the screen.

So, I will come down here to the layers pallet and notice at the bottom of the layers pallet right here between the adjustment layers and the floor icon, I have got this guy right here which allows me to add a mask to a layer. A layer specific mask and I will do that just b