With Photoshop 6.0 we have the power to create cool layer styles and save them for use later. For those unfamiliar with the new layer style palette' here's a refresher.
Styles are great for adding cool effects to type, vector shapes, and bitmaps.
These include shadows, glows, bevels, embosses, satin, bumps, color overlays, gradient overlays, pattern overlays, and strokes. These effects can be combined and edited in a multitude of ways. Actions are more powerful in that you can also add filters, transform, and image manipulation to a graphic and save them for use later.