Layout or Layer effects

Is it possible to exclude a single layer from a layout effect? If not, is it as efficient to give each layer an effect except the one? I'm using quite a few layers so it'd be much easier to be able to exclude certain ones..Perhaps it could be an option in future builds?

It's not easily possible to exclude a single layer from a layout effect. The way the rendering pipeline works, all layers have already been rendered by the time the layout effect renders, so it can't go back and undo an effect.

Currently the only way is to have the effect on each layer, but this will be N times slower than a layout effect (where N is the number of layers you add the effect to). This could be fixed if we supported folder-organised layers and you could apply a single effect to a group of layers... but that would be an architectural change, and I'm not sure we can do that in the near future.