Photoshop: Quickly show or hide all layerstyles

As my other tutorials have shown, I’m fond of Photoshop layer-styles. For skinning projects, however, large amounts of layers may be required to accommodate the various layer-styles (I have some files for skins that use between 400-1000 layers). When there are many styled layers working in conjunction, it may become difficult to determine at a glance what the actual contents of a layer are or its location. This is especially true of compositions including lots of Stroke, Outer Bevel, Drop Shadow, and Outer Glow styles.

To counteract this problem for myself, I devised two simple actions that quickly became my personal favorites.

Quickly Show/Hide all layer-styles

Requirements

• Photoshop 6.0 and higher.
• Layers palette is enabled and visible. If yours isn’t, then activate it from the menu by selecting Windows then Layers.

Step by step hiding/showing layers

Hiding all layer-styles

1. First, you must select a visible layer from the layers palette. Just click on a layer (not a folder) and make sure it has the little eyeball icon next to it, indicating its visibility.
2. Navigate through the menus to Layer > Layer Style > Hide all effects

Showing all layer-styles

1. First, you must select a visible layer from the layers palette. Just click on a layer (not a folder) and make sure it has the little eyeball icon next to it, indicating its visibility.
2. Navigate through the menus to Layer > Layer Style > Show all effects

I’ve created actions for these so that the F11 key hides all layer-styles and F12 shows all effects. Again, these options only work when you have a visible layer selected, not a layer-folder or hidden layer.