Layer styles, or layer effects, may not be quite as popular as they were a few years ago, but they’re still very useful tools that you’ll use a lot. They produce very good results, as seen in the image below, which shows the difference in the quality between a stroke layer style and a pixel layer style. A 16-px black stroke was applied to both instances of the text here. The top image shows a Stroke layer style, and the bottom one uses the Edit>Stroke command to apply the pixels. Another nice thing about a layer style, apart from the fact that it looks better and can be changed at any time, is how easy it is to separate from the object and put onto a different layer for a different effect. All you need to do it Right-click on the word Effects in the Layers panel and choose Create Layer.
This tip previously published in Colin Smith’s Photoshop Tips column, in the November/December 2019 issue of Photoshop User magazine.
