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

A few weeks ago, we covered the basics of Layer Styles (www.digitalmastery.com/tips/062801tip.html). But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Layer Styles are such an incredibly useful and robust tool, that's it's well worth our while to dig a little deeper and explore some more intermediate and advanced techniques.

When you apply a Layer Style, Photoshop records the resolution of your image as part of the style. But be warned. If you scale your image by choosing Image>Image Size, your image will get larger, but the effects applied to the layers will not. So, if you'd like the effects to match your image, you must make sure to change the resolution setting in the Image Size dialog box. Do this by first scaling your image (which will give you the info you need to determine your new resolution), and then clicking on the Reset button in the Image Size dialog box and entering the new resolution. Note--the Reset button will only appear when you are holding down the Option key (Mac) or Alt key (Win.)

Here's a step-by-step example of what I'm talking about: Choose Edit>Duplicate, so you're working on a copy of the original file. Choose Image>Image Size and scale your image to the size you want it to be. Before you leave the Image Size dialog box, take a look at the pixel dimensions that are listed at the top of the dialog box. Now, hold Option (Mac), or Alt (Win) and click the Reset button (it's usually labeled Cancel). Next, change the resolution setting at the bottom of the dialog box until the pixel dimensions of the image are identical to what you got when you first attempted to scale the image. Click ok, and then go back to the original file and scale your image without changing the resolution setting. Go to the duplicate file and drag the layers that have styles applied to them over to the original document. Finally, replace the layers where the styles didn't scale with the new layers you just dragged over.

If you found that last tip to be a little too much of a brain frazzler, then try this instead: After scaling your image using Image>Image Size, click on a layer that has a style that didn't scale with the image. Now, choose Layer>Layer Style>Scale Effects and experiment with the slider that appears until the effects look appropriate. This feature is also useful when you've applied a style from the Styles palette because all of those styles are designed for images of specific resolutions and will look different depending on the resolution of the document they are applied to.

Photoshop 6 comes with a few extra styles that you can load into the Style palette. To access them, click on the side menu of the Styles palette and choose one of the presets that are listed at the bottom of the menu. When you do that Photoshop will ask you if you want to replace the current styles, or append them. Appending them will add the styles to the bottom of the Style palette. If you'd like to replace the styles, instead of appending them, just hold the Option key (Mac), or Alt key (Win) when choosing one of the presets from the side menu. This also works with Brush, Swatch and Custom Shape presets in their respective palettes.

If you'd like to save your own set of styles, then choose Save Styles from the side menu of the Styles palette. Photoshop will usually send you to the Photoshop>Presets>Styles folder. If you save your presets in that folder, then they will appear at the bottom of the side menu the next time you launch Photoshop.

The Save Styles command will save all the styles that are currently shown in the Styles palette. If you'd like to save just one or two styles, instead of the whole list, then choose Edit>Preset Manager and choose Styles from the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog box that appears. Now, click on one of the styles you'd like to save. To select more than one, hold the Shift key while you click. Once you've selected all the styles you want to save, then click the Save Set button to save those as a preset.

Once you've saved a preset, you can give that file to a friend. Then, to quickly load the preset in Photoshop, just double-click on the file (FYI: I haven't tested this part in Windows). Either that, or choose Load Set from the side menu of the Styles palette.

I've got a lot more Layer Styles tips for you, but this is getting to be a bit long-winded, so I'll end for now. We'll explore styles in more detail in a future installment.

Photoshop continues to fuel my imagination and send me off to far places. After three Photoshoppy days in Florida, I've got 24 hours to write this tip, do laundry, pack, snooze and head for the airport to the oh-so-cool Santa Fe Workshops, Michigan State University and finally San Jose, where'll I'll catch up with my friends at Adobe. I'll talk to you next week, hopefully with no jetlag

-Ben Willmore