Working with Photoshop layers

- [Instructor] In this first exercise, we'll take a look at a few examples in how you can access and change the visibility of Photoshop layers when working with a placed Photoshop document inside of Adobe InDesign. Here inside of Adobe InDesign, I have a brochure with two pages. On the first page, I have a cover image of flowers, and here if I scroll down on the second page, I have another large picture on the left-hand side. Now these two pictures are placed PSD documents. Now let's go back to Photoshop and take a look at them. Now here inside of Adobe Photoshop, I have my first image. This image consists of two layers. The first one is your regular background layer, and the second one is a copy of that same layer, but in a transparent version. Here in the second layer, I'm using a black and white adjustment layer that also adds a pink tint effect. Now by default, I do not want to see the pink overlay, I only want to see it when I need it specifically. Let's go back to Adobe InDesign. Now the effect that I would like to achieve here on the cover is that I would like these little petals here to overlap with the title. So I'll select this image and alt + drag + copy to duplicate this image. And now I need a way to hide the bottommost layer from the placed PSD file. Now to do so, I'll make sure that this image is selected, go up to the object menu, and choose object layer options. So from here, I can access all of this PSD file's layers, and I'll click the background image to deselect it, and it will hide it here directly within Adobe InDesign. I'll click OK, I'll click and drag it to align it back from where it came from to make sure that these two images are aligned perfectly. Now you don't really see a difference, which is simply because it's not overlapping with the text, so I have to send that picture to the foreground of the layer stack. I'll click the layers panel from here at the top, and drag and drop this to the top of the stack, and now as you can see, this transparent PSD file is visually overlapping with my text, which is exactly what I wanted. Now, let's go back to the second page here and make a local change as well. So I will select the image, but instead of going up to the object menu and choosing object layer options, instead, I'll just right-click instead, and choose object layer options. Same thing, here I have both layers visible, I'll select the pink overlay to activate it, and click OK to close. So again, this is exactly the effect I was looking for. Now there's one thing you have to be very careful for. If you go back to Photoshop, and make a local change, for example, if I were to come in and add a few layers, save the document, and then return to InDesign, trigger the update, InDesign will tell you that the file has different layers than the imported version and the link will be updated with the source file's current layer visibility settings. In other words, you've changed the layer stack, you've changed the integrity of the Photoshop document since it was imported into Adobe InDesign, and basically, InDesign doesn't really know what to do with this file anymore, so it will just reset to whichever version you have here in Photoshop. Now if you want to avoid this, it's very important that you do not add extra layers, you do not change the stacking order of existing layers, you do not delete layers, and you do not rename layers here inside of Adobe InDesign. So now everything's back, reverted to what it was. I'll quickly save the document, and then go back to Adobe InDesign, and update it. Now, let's try this again, right-click, object layer options, and activate the pink overlay option here. Now at the bottom, there is an update link options setting that you can choose from. So when updating the link, we have to keep the layer visibility overrides active, which is exactly what I wanted here inside of Adobe InDesign. Of course, with the exception of what I've just explained. Or, you can also always choose to use Photoshop's layer visibility settings, whatever you do here instead of Adobe InDesign. But of course, if I were to choose this, then that would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise. I'll just choose OK and continue with this. There we go. Now you'll notice that using Photoshop layers with an InDesign document is not just easy, but it's also very powerful, especially if you want to try out different creative versions of the same file. Or imagine you're designing templates for various outputs, but be sure to keep your files well-organized to avoid unexpected changes, especially when you're sharing your files with others.