Back in Issue #57 of our tips email, we demonstrated a fun technique for creating realistic water droplets using layer styles in Adobe Photoshop. The effect was created using a combination of four different layer style settings.

The effect looks good with droplets. But when we apply that same set of layer styles to type, we found we needed to reduce the size of the effect by about 50% to make it look right. We could go into each setting individually and reduce the effect sizes by 50% — or we could use Photoshop’s “Scale Effect” option to make the adjustment quickly and easily across all layer styles at once.

To scale your layer effects, highlight a layer in Photoshop that has a Layer Style applied.

Then in Photoshop’s menu, select:

Layer > Layer Style > Scale Effects.

Which brings up the Scale Layer Effects dialog.

You can reduce the scale down as low as 1% to make the effects smaller, or increase the scale up to 1000% to make the effects larger.

Source: This tip inspired by a write-up by Sue Chastain in the About: Graphic Software website.