A glowing blue text effect done with PS 6:

1. Type your text in a light blue on a bit darker background. Mode: Overlay.

2. Choose the Layer effects icon at the bottom of the layers palette and click on Drop Shadow. Make your shadow dark blue. Uncheck the box for "layer knocks out drop shadow". This puts the shadow kinda on top of the letters.

3. Ctrl-click the type layer to select it. Select -> Modify -> Expand.. and expand it several pixels (I used 5 i think.) 

4. Edit -> Copy Merged. (This takes everything that is within the selection and merges it together onto the clipboard.)

5. Make a new layer and do Edit -> Paste. (This pastes what you just did onto the new layer. Now you can mess with it as one object instead of as a blending-moded drop-shadowed bunch of text.)

6. If you think this is too crisp, Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian blur .. and give it some blur. Then trim it by doing ctrl-click on the text layer that you started out with. This will also trim the drop shadow, but you will add that back in the next step.

7. Click the layer effects icon at the bottom of the layers palette and choose drop shadow. Do whatever kind of drop shadow you like. I used a deep blue.

Here is another rendition. For this one i didn't click "layer knocks out drop shadow."

Color wheel done with 26 layers, all but one in difference mode. 
6 colors, 4 circles each, RGBCY&M. 
Rotate them 15 degrees apart around the circle, using the center of the circle as the center of rotation.  Please click to enlarge.

Bursting through paper

I did this as a "challenge" from the newsgroup. It is a drawn effect using gradients, airbrush, and layer masks. This little effect took me 7 layers: background, main paper layer, outline (later blurred), undershadow, main wings (hidden), main wings with "torn" edges, shadow on tips of wings, the hand (with its mask), and the hand shadow.

This one is weird to me because the letters burned themselves BIGGER. 

MY challenge 

Here is how i did this: 

1. Use type mask tool to write out your text. 

2. Make a new layer. Type d to make default colors. (black & white)

3. Using arrow keys, nudge the selection up two and left 2. Ctrl-backspace to fill with background color (white).

4. Using arrow keys again, nudge the selection down 4 and right 4. Alt-backspace to fill with foreground color (black). 

5. Using arrow keys yet again, nudge the selection up two and left 2. Hit the delete key. 

6. For the one below instead of hitting delete, I ran a gradient across the selected writing.

This looks cool on lots of different backgrounds. Check this out.

Polaroid Transfer Look
1.  I did this by first making a rectangular marquee just outside the edge of the picture and then holding alt and making another rect marquee just inside the edge of the picture. 

2.  Then, with this area still selected, i used the Filter -> Sketch -> Stamp (settings 4 and 5) on this selected edge.

3.  Then, still working on just the selected edge, I used filter -> wind -> -90 degrees and 19 pixels.

4.  Finally i deselected and then used the smudge tool to draw out little rectangles of color from the picture out onto its edge. I rather think the effect is pretty good, at least pretty close to that of the page whence the idea came.