What are Layer Styles in Krita?
Layer styles are simple non-destructive effects that can be applied to a single layer or layer group such as a contouring stroke or a drop shadow. There's a limited number of styles provided by Krita, each with its own settings that you can customize.
Although they can be useful for creating graphics, it seems that this is a Krita feature that isn't well-maintained. There are multiple places where it literally says "not implemented" in the application, which is simply not something that a user should ever see. Layer styles were added in version 5.0 to make Krita more compatible with Adobe Photoshop, but as of version 5.2.2, not all features of Photoshop are implemented in Krita.
This feature was added to increase support for Adobe Photoshop. The features that are included mirror what that application supports.
https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/layers_and_masks/layer_styles.html (accessed 2025-06-04)
What is the Difference Between Layer Styles and Filters?
The effects available as layer styles in Krita aren't available as filters, and vice-versa.
It should be technically possible to recreate some if not all styles using filter layers, fill layers, and clone layers, however not only would that look far more complicated, it also uses more RAM.
In practice, you may run into bugs in Krita that prevent this. For example, the Stroke filter can be created using a blur filter, but using a very large Gaussian blur filter layer in Krita sometimes renders incorrectly, while the Stroke effect works with any width.
It's possible to save a layer style as a preset and quickly choose it later, and even copy and paste layer styles from one layer to another.
Personally, I think it would be simpler if Krita only had filters instead of filters and styles. There might be some technical reason why it was done this way, or perhaps they simply wanted to make it familiar to Photoshop and Photopea users.
How to Add a Layer Style
To add a layer style in Krita, follow the following steps:
1: in the layers docker, right click on the layer or layer group that you want to add a layer style to to open its context menu.
2: select the option "Layer Style..." to open the layer style dialog. It's one of the first options from the top.
3: this dialog has a list-detail layout. On the list pane, there are squares next to the names of the effects you can select. The squares are actually checkboxes. Check the checkbox of the effect you want to add.
4: in the detail pane, customize the effect settings to your liking.
5: click OK to apply your changes.
Showing and Hiding the Layer Style
After a layer style has been added to a layer, a small icon labelled "Fx" will appear on the layer list to indicate that the layer has a style. Clicking on this icon toggles the layer style on and off. That is, you can click on it to hide the style temporarily if you want.
Layer Style Effects Cheat Sheet
For reference, the effects currently available in Krita:
Some notes about how each layer style works:
- Drop Shadow: creates a shadow cast from the opaque pixels of the layer. You can specify direction, length, color, etc.
- Inner Shadow: casts a shadow clipped to the opaque pixels of the layer.
- Outer Glow: creates a glow around the opaque pixels.
- Inner Glow: creates a glow clipped to the opaque pixels.
- Bevel and Emboss: creates a 3D effect on flat shapes. While this effect is enabled, you can enable two effects that would otherwise be grayed out: Contour and Texture.
- Contour: this effect says it's not implemented yet, which is strange because it seems to actually add an almost imperceptible contour currently. I think someone must have started programming it and left it in an incomplete state.
- Texture: this seems to be identical to Pattern Overlay, but it's applied before Bevel and Emboss, which means the 3D effect is applied to the texture.
- Satin: seems to create two inner shadows at opposite sides.
- Color Overlay: quickly applies a flat color clipped to the opaque pixels of the layer.
- Gradient Overlay: applies a gradient instead of a flat color.
- Pattern Overlay: applies a pattern instead.
- Stroke: draws a contour around the opaque pixels of the layer. This doesn't work very well if you have semi-transparent pixels created with an airbrush brush, for example.
As you may be able to tell, a common feature of layer style effects is that they are either clipped to the opaque pixels or are created surrounding the opaque pixels of the layer.
Each effect has various options, which typically include blending mode, color, opacity, direction, length, and so on.
In particular, it's a good idea to experiment with different colors and blending modes. It seems the defaults for Color Overplay is a white color with Multiply blending mode, which does nothing because any color multiplied by white is itself, so you need to customize this one to make the effect do anything to the layer. Just because an effect is called "shadow" doesn't mean you need to make it dark. You can use a bright color and change the blending mode to Normal to make it appear. Similarly, you can use a dark color with the "glow" effects if you want, thus "drop shadow" can be "directional glow," and "outer glow" can be "360 degrees shadow."
Troubleshooting
Pass Through Layer Group & Layer Styles
If you have a layer group with a layer style but the layer style isn't visible, it's possible that the layer group has the Pass Yhrough mode enabled. When a layer group is in Pass Through mode, layer styles don't work. More technically, they can't work.
A layer group in Pass Through mode is for organizational purposes only. More specifically, in order for layer styles to work they need an image. Usually this would be the image contained in a layer. When you have a layer group, the image is the composite image of the layers within the layer group.When a layer is in Pass Through mode, Krita doesn't create this composite image for the layer group, and this has all sorts of consequences, one of which being that you can't use layer styles with the layer group.
Applying Multiple Layer Styles to a Single Layer
If you are an avid layer style user, you may have noticed that while you can have multiple different effects applied to the same layer, you can't have multiple of the same effect applied to a single layer. For example, at first glance it appears it's not possible to have a layer in Krita with 2 stroke effects of different colors, or with two drop shadow effects.
There are multiple ways to work around this limitation depending on what effect you're aiming to achieve.
The simplest method is to add an effect to one layer, place it inside a group, and then add the same effect to the group. With this method you can have, for example, 2 strokes on the same layer. More specifically, you have a single stroke on one layer, and then you have a second stroke on the composite image of the first layer and its stroke.
A more complex method is to use clone layers and the Erase blend mode to extract the layer effect from the layer. If you can extract the effect, you can combined two extractions from the same starting point using whatever blending mode you please. You can use this technique to, for example, combine two drop shadows so that areas where both shadows are cast are twice as a dark. If you used the other method instead, you would have one shadow being cast after the first shadow, which also looks very cool, but may not be what you wanted.