Could you explain the differences between your suggestion and the one
described in bug #79025 ?  They look very similar, so maybe the
"layer styles" or "layer effects" are the same thing as the
"adjustment layers"?  If not, please explain the differences.

This is not a dup fo bug 79025. Style Layers (in Photoshop) are used
for effects, like     Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner
Glow, Bevel and Emboss,    Satin, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay,
Pattern Overlay, Add Border.

Adjustment layers add a mask with one of these functionalities: Solid
Color, Gradient, Pattern or Levels, Curves, Color Balance,
Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Selective Color, Channel Mixer,
Gradient Map or Invert, Treshold, Posterize.

The second tutorial gives a good example on how adjustment layers are
used at work.

I still do not understand what is different...  Styles and adjustment
layers are implemented as two separate features in Photoshop, but I do
no understand why they need to be different.  From my point of view,
these are just two possible uses for "active layers" (as discussed
some time ago on the gimp-developer mailing list)

Basically, the idea that I had in mind for these active layers was to
have a special type of layer that automatically gets a merged copy of
the data contained in the visible layers below it, and this copy is
immediately processed by a tool or plug-in (I hope that it would be
possible to have any PDB call associated with this layer).  Every
time the source layers are changed, or every time the PDB parameters
are changed, a background task would run the PDB function over the
affected area so that what you see through the active layer is the
result of applying the corresponding operation on the source layers.

So please convince me that this report is different from bug #79025.
;-)

I think the main difference is that adjustment layers use a mask and
style layers do not. 
Note: the style and adjustment layers may effect all visible layers
below or can be assigned to a specific layer (thats why I set this bug
depending on bug 51112).

Well, you finally convinced me that both of them are the same.  ;-)

I do not know why Photoshop does not allow "layer styles" to have
masks, because I thought that both of them ("styles" and "adjustment
layers") could use masks.  So unless I missed something important,
both of them could be implemented using the "active layers" that were
proposed some time ago (but still have to be implemented).


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 79025 ***