The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore
(www.digitalmastery.com):

Layer Style tips (part 1)

When Photoshop 6.0 was released, Adobe made quite a few improvements to Layer Styles (they were called Layer Effects in previous versions). They provide some awesome effects, and are incredibly easy to use and edit.

If you're not familiar with Layer Styles, try entering some text in Photoshop and then experiment with the Layer>Layer Style menu. That's where you can add simple effects, like drop shadows and glows to the contents of a layer. Layer Styles, by the way, aren't limited to just text, they also will work on a layer that contains an image.

A quicker way of adding a style in 6.0, is to click on the Styles menu at the bottom of the Layers palette. It looks like a black circle with an "f" in it.

When adding a drop shadow, you can move your cursor over your image and click and drag to reposition the shadow. But, this only works while the Layer Style dialog box is open.

If you find other layers that have drop shadow styles applied to them changing as well, then those layers must have the Use Global Light checkbox turned on (in the Layer Styles dialog box). When that option is used, then all the layers that contain styles will act as if the light source is coming from the same angle as the other layers. If you change the angle of the light on one layer, then all the others will change to match it. If you'd rather have one layer act independently, then go back to the Layer Styles dialog box and turn off that checkbox.

After adding a Style to a layer, you will see a black circle with an "f" in it appearing in your Layers palette. That's an indication that a style is applied to that layer. If you click on the small triangle next to the black circle, then Photoshop will list the styles applied below the layer. You can temporarily disable a layer style buy clicking on the eyeball icon next to the style name (in the Layers palette).

You can also drag the name of a style to the trash to remove it from that layer, or drag it just below another layer to copy it to that layer. If you drag the word "Effects" to the trash or to another layer, then it should affect all the styles applied to that layer.

If you want to change the settings used for a particular style, just double-click on the name of the style in the Layers palette.

Once you've fine-tuned the styles applied to a layer, you can save those settings as a preset by choosing View>Show Styles and then clicking on the new Style icon (it looks like a sheet of paper with the corner folded over). Then the next time you'd like to use the same settings, just click on the layer you'd like to apply them to, and then click on the preview image for that style in the Styles palette.

If you have a style applied to a layer and you like the overall look, but you'd rather not see the contents of the layer (you want to just see what the style was doing to the layer), then double-click on the name of the layer and set the Fill Opacity setting to zero. That will allow you to create effects like a stroke around the edge of text, but the text itself doesn't have to be visible.

This week, we've only scratched the surface of what Layer Styles can do, so I'm sure I'll cover more tips in this area sometime in the future. Have a good week, and be sure to read the PS: this time.

-Ben Willmore