Power Up Your Layer Styles

Here’s a little-known tip for controlling the intensity of your layer styles. This is particularly helpful if you’ve applied a number of different layer styles to a layer, and want to affect them all at the same time, rather than tweaking each one individually. It’s called Scale Effects, and it’s buried in the Layer menu, at the bottom of the Layer Style submenu. Choose it, and a dialog appears with a slider set to 100% by default. As you increase the amount (up to 1000% maximum), it increases the “scale” of all your effects. For example, if you increased the scale of a Drop Shadow layer style, the shadow would become blurrier and its distance from the object would become greater. If you adjusted a Stroke Layer Style, the stroke would become thicker, etc. Pretty powerful stuff.