I got here because when I was investigating the challenge I wondered where to send the final. I guess it would be here. I've been a bit remiss lately with my attention to rosity at large... busy. however I'm up for any challenges no matter the criteria ps being my main illustrating tool, (printing & publishing collar) not too much 3D going on in books. Back later with a cd... RAWeaver

PS8 has a while in coming the project this year, and we all should know that Adobe revamps one product per calendar, is/was InDesign. Rumors have it that A new Streamline product is in the think tank. Thanx for the link Enian!

Isn't Photoshop great? One of the thing's i love about and why it is one of my Primary tools is that it offers a myrriad of solutions to any one problem. My main concern in telling Vandalar to create a new doc. was in the supposition that he discovered the problem that multi- layer filtering has on multiplicity of effect, ie; 2x 3x of the same effect overlapping. I wanted to make it as simple as possible because he stated he was a beginner. Am I making sense??? Anyways I'm new to render but not to ps, Key commands are great but how can you get paint under your fingernails that way. Experiment. Great advice in all the replies, all good options.

Two words come to mind here, "Machintosh" and "ram". In reviewing the message board here and trying to gain an insight to this community I would like to say that Adobe and Apple are good friends, and have been from the beginning. I have the same software installed on both formats, with 5 times the ram on my mac. Invariably, it runs better. (meant in a good way, I hope I didn't offend anyone). :) Rick

That's hilarious

Filtering multiple layers at the same time is not entirely impossible and perhaps you have already discovered this remedy. The best way to achieve this, is to indeed merge the desired layers to be filtered uniformally. However, if you duplicate the doc, merge the wanted layers in the new doc, copy and paste the new result as a new layer in the primary illustration, you can maintain the integrity of your originals and manipulate the previously unsmashed layers as over or underlays with a myriad of opacity, masking, etc; options.