Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

Below we present, step by step, several practical techniques to help you refine your designs, increase productivity and reduce layer clutter.

Sometimes you just need a good, simple, flat pattern in Photoshop. A plain ol’ grid, or something to give the design a bit of textural “oomph” but without the cheesiness of a full-on seamless photo. Presenting Flatterns, pixely patterns I made just for you.

Follow this step by step post processing guide to give your photos a dark lomo style effect with high contrast, blue tones and vignette burns. The effect is based on the popular lomographic technique and is similar to the processing effect used in many fashion shots and advertisement designs. Overall this effect does a great job of adding impact to a plain photography with cool colour casts and unusual saturation.

But I don’t have many tricks in my Lightroom photo-doctoring bag. In fact, everything I was doing I had learned from a brief demonstration by Tyler Stableford, an outdoor sports and adventure photographer who uses Lightroom to make his photos just a bit more dazzling.

In this Photoshop effects tutorial, we're going to look at how to easily create a Photoshop puzzle effect, allowing us to turn any photo into a jigsaw puzzle! Or at least, we'll be creating the illusion that the photo is made up of small puzzle pieces, although I suppose you could print the photo afterwards, cut around all the pieces with scissors and make an actual puzzle out of it, but as I like to say, why fumble around with reality when faking things in Photoshop is so much easier.

I'm Neven Mrgan, a designer at Panic Inc. I design whatever needs designing.

The video above describes two techniques for changing color in your photos with Photoshop. The first involves using the color replacement tool/brush to effectively paint on a new color, and the second involves the more complicated method of manually selecting the object and manipulating its light and color values.

Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 8 is the leading photo-editing software for Mac, combining power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos. Make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in creative ways, and easily manage all your photos. Works great with iPhoto!

All the iOS icons required: "Let’s say you’re working on an icon for an iOS app. The app is universal, so it should run on all iPhones (and iPod touches), and on the iPad. As a designer, you’re used to drawing icons at various sizes; this is a big part of what “icon design” is (as opposed to other types of illustration)."