The Sorcerer's Workshop

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Unlike hula-hoops, pet rocks and mood rings, 'Layer Styles' will never go out of style. With Photoshop 6.0 we have the power to create cool layer styles and save them for use later. In earlier versions you had to manually apply shadow effects, beveling, embossing, and glows every time (you could do copy and paste but it was still limiting). Layer styles now resemble, to some degree, the power of 'Actions.'

Layer Style Palette
For those unfamiliar with the new layer style palette' here's a refresher. Styles are great for adding cool effects to type, vector shapes, and bitmaps. These include shadows, glows, bevels, embosses, satin, bumps, color overlays, gradient overlays, pattern overlays, and strokes. These effects can be combined and edited in a multitude of ways. Naturally these styles can be saved like 'Photoshop Actions.'

NOTE: Actions are more powerful in that you can also add filters, transform, and image manipulation to a graphic and save them for use later.

Layer Styles are option crazy

Style Library
Adobe provides a number of existing styles that can be immediately applied or edited and saved under new names. Applying a style is as simple as selecting a layer in an image and clicking on the appropriate style in the 'Style' palette. You can choose how to view your available styles and which sets you want visible at any one time.

Styling Flexibility
Here are a number of styles applied to some text for my future comic book about a group of mutant, super hero dogs called appropriately - x-dogs (I know, you just wished you thought of that didn't you). I applied these styles in 30 seconds.

Styles applied to text

I liked the 3rd layer style but I wanted to make some changes to the existing style called - Green Gradient with Stroke. I bring up the 'Styles' palette and click 'New Style.' I call it 'x-dogs' after my soon to be smash hit comic book. I click OK and it is included in my 'Styles' library.

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