Layer effects and styles

Photoshop and ImageReady provide a variety of effects—such as shadows, glows, bevels, overlays, and strokes — that let you quickly change the appearance of a layer’s contents. Layer effects are linked to the layer contents. When you move or edit the contents of the layer, the effects are modified correspondingly. For example, if you apply a drop shadow effect to a text layer, the shadow changes automatically as you edit the text.

The effects that you apply to a layer become part of the layer’s custom style. When a layer has a style, an “f” icon appears to the right of the layer’s name in the Layers palette. You can expand the style in the Layers palette to view all the effects that compose the style and edit the effects to change the style.
When you save a custom style, it becomes a preset style. Preset styles appear in the Styles palette and can be applied with a single click.

How to use downloaded Photoshop Styles and very helpful tricks:

1. Click & Type

2. Copy Layer Style

3. Add New Style

4. Instructions on how to load a library of preset styles [ASL file]

5. How to scale layer effects (styles)

6. How to scale photoshop template with layer styles

7. How to scale patterns (soon)