From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Exploring layer basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

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Exploring layer basics

- [Instructor] Photoshop's ability to work with layers is definitely one of my favorite features. So let's take a look at how we can master the layers panel in order to easily work with multiple images in a single document. Let's start by creating a new document. And I'm going to set the width and height to pixels and I'm going to change it to 2,600 by 1625. I want the resolution to be 300 pixels per inch, RGB color eight bit and I'll put the background contents to white and then click Create. Then I'll use Command tab on Mac or Alt tab on Windows to move to bridge where I'll select both the grapes as well as the greens layer and then just use the keyboard shortcut Command + O on Mac or Control + O on Windows to open those two images. So we can see now that I have three documents open, I have my untitled document, my grapes, as well as the greens. I can click on any of the tabs to view them, but I can also use Control + Tab in order to cycle through them at any point in time. But I want to see all three of the images at one time so I'll choose Window and then Arrange and then Tile. Now, if you've been following along with the course, we set up a custom keyboard shortcut Command Shift + T so we could use that as well. Now that I can see all of my different images, I can click with the Move tool on any one of these images to make it the target document. And if you watch in the layers panel, we get a preview of the contents of that layer. So with the greens layer targeted, I'm going to drag the background from the layers panel and drop it onto my untitled document. If I hold the Shift key as I drag and drop, then Photoshop will drop it right in the center of the document. Then I can click the greens file to target it and then use the X in order to close it. Then I'll click on the grapes document and again from the layers panel, I'll drag the background and drop it into the untitled document, holding down the Shift key to center the layer. I'll close the grapes layer and now we can see our multilayered document, the untitled layer that has layer two and layer one. I want to rename these layers so I'm going to double click on the name and I'll just call this grapes and then tap Enter to apply that and then again I'll double click on layer one and rename it greens, tapping Enter to apply that. If you didn't hold down the Shift key, it's really not a problem if your images aren't centered, because you can always target the layer in the layers panel and with the Move tool selected, we could reposition them. I want to point out there's a difference between targeting a layer and hiding and showing the layer, toggling the visibility of the layer. If I click the eye icon that will toggle the visibility, but I actually need to click on the layer if I want to target it. If I hide the visibility for all of the layers, we can see the checkerboard that's going to represent transparency in your Photoshop document. All right, let's toggle back on the visibility of the background and also target it. So the background layer is unique, there are three things you can't do. You can't change the stacking order, meaning that I can't drag it up in the layers panel nor can I reposition it. So with the move tool selected, if I click and drag, Photoshop isn't going to reposition the image, in fact, it has Auto-select on and it deselected the background layer. So I need to target that background again, and the third thing you can't do is you can't erase to transparency when you're on a background. So if I tap the E key to select the eraser tool or if I select it from the toolbar and if I start to erase, well, my background color is white, so we wouldn't really see visually any difference, but if I switch this so that the background color is black and I tried to erase, it looks like I'm painting with black because I'm erasing to that background color. So I'll undo that using Command + Z on Mac or Control + Z on Windows. So in order to change the background into a layer, the easiest way is to just click on the Lock icon in the layers panel. Now I can go ahead and switch to the Move tool and I could reposition the background layer. Again I'll undo that using Command + Z on Mac or Control + Z on Windows, I can change the stacking order so I could reposition it above the greens so that it would actually hide that greens layer or I can move it back below the greens layer. And if I tap the E key again to select the eraser, now when I erase, we're actually going to see transparency below this layer, we're not going to be erasing to the background color. So again, I'll use Command + Z or Control + Z to undo that. All right, let's target the grapes layer and also make it visible. Now I want the grapes layer to only appear in the top portion of the image. So I'm going to use the View menu in order to show my rulers and then I can drag out a guide. But it would probably be helpful if I right click or on Mac you can Control click and set the guide 2%. That will make it very easy for me to drag from the ruler area down into the image area and it will snap at 50% and I know that because I'm looking at the ruler on the left side or you can see with the heads up display that Y equals 50%. Then I'll tap the V key to select the move tool and with that grapes' layers targeted, I can go ahead and reposition it in the image area and I'll reposition it right to about there. Now, if I only want it to appear in the upper half of my image, I need to get rid of this area. So the first way we will remove content on a layer is by using the Marquee tool and then dragging a Marquee around the area that we want to delete and simply tapping the Delete key. Now this is a permanent change so I've actually gotten rid of that information. So let's try this again on another layer and see if we can do it in a more nondestructive manner. I'll use the Select menu, and then de-select the Marquee selection and then I'll hide this layer for a moment, I'll make the greens layer visible and I'll also target it in the layers panel. This time I'm going to select the Frame tool from the toolbar and I'm going to make sure that it's set to the first icon here, which will drag out a rectangle. I'm then going to start in the upper left hand corner and drag out a frame around the area that I want to keep, in this case, the top 50% of the document. Photoshop will automatically create a frame and if we look in the layers panel, I now have two icons. I have the icon for the frame that I can select or I have the icon for the image. If I click on the frame, which would highlight it, and we can see that it adds these transformation handles, then I can click and drag any of those handles to change the size of the frame. I'll use Command + Z or Controls + Z the on Windows to undo that. If I click inside the frame area, then I can reposition the photograph or the contents of the layer within that frame. And if I double click here inside the image, now we can see on the layers panel that both the frame and the image are targeted, so now if I reposition it, I'm repositioning the frame and the contents of that frame as well. All right, I'll use Command + Z to undo that. Then on the layers panel I'm going to target the contents of the layer and then just reposition that a bit. Now at this point we've done enough work on the image that I would want to save it. So from the File menu, I'll choose Save, I'll rename it harvest, making sure that I save it as a Photoshop or as a TIF file, and I'll save that into the 06 layers folder with the layers and click Save. Now if I scoot back to bridge, we can see all of the original exercise files as well as our new Harvest.psd.

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