PhotoShop Tip of the Day

I use layer styles all the time in PhotoShop. But over the last few months, I've had to export my work more to use in other programs. If you stick with the Adobe family of programs, this is a no brainer, but other applications don't recognize layer styles and this requires that you flatten the images to use them elsewhere. Most of the styles don't change when you do this, but bevels disappear when you flatten the layers. It was driving me crazy until I discovered that if you first place an empty layer under the layer with the bevel or emboss and then merge the two layers, the effect remains intact. If you don't need transparency, you can just save the file as a jpeg and the effects also remain intact in the jpeg file.