Outer glow not working properly for me, please help!

[Whispering_knight7540]

When I try applying outer glow, this happens... I made my logo on a different software and want to use photoshop to add additional effects. However when I use the outer glow it gets limited by this arbitrary bounding box. I'm assuming I need it to act like a normal object but I don't know how. I tried doing stuff like raterizing and converting to smart object but none of it has worked. How do I fix this issue? 

[Trevor.Dennis]

It looks like the layer has contend other than the blue Z character.

Create a new layer

Ctrl click the layer with the Outer Glow effect to load it as a selection.

And fill with foreground colour (Alt backspace)

This will show the true contents of the layer.

It would be useful if you include the Layers Styles panel in your next screenshot.

[Whispering_knight7540]

Ok so I did not find any extra contents but when I opened layer styles and changed it to the black square now it works properly! Thanks!

[Whispering_knight7540]

Actually wait...  After I changed layer style it didn't let me use any blending options, so I still have the issue, so nevermind, it's not fixed. What is wrong here, there shouldn't be any extra parts and even if there was it should be able to go beyond the box. Is there a way to make the box larger?

[Trevor.Dennis]

Did you do what I asked and check the layer outline?

Try this:

Turn the layer style off.

Add a new layer and clip it to the Z layer.

Fill the new layer with any colour.

Is it show just the Z shape, or does it show the irregular outline in your screenshots?

If it just shows the Z shape then there is something more going on. 

I see you had the Layer Styles panel in your screen shot.  Have you used one of those?

We shouldn't be able to see that irregular outline from Outer Glow.

I would start again by resetting Outer Glow

[Bojan Živković]

Did you extract the letter Z from the background, or is Z imported with transparency? It may be that during masking or background extraction, there are leftovers that are difficult to spot but show up when the layer effect is applied.