From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Photoshop (2019)

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Flattening and merging layers

Flattening and merging layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Photoshop (2019)

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Flattening and merging layers

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at the pros and cons of flattening and merging layers in Photoshop. In our magazine cover file, we have lots of layers, several of which aren't contributing at all to the final look. But they are cluttering up the Layers panel and increasing the file size. When the menu at the bottom of the window is set to document sizes, you can see what the file size would be flattened, in this case, six megabytes, and the layered file size, which is over 50 megabytes. So there's a lot of data that we can potentially get rid of here, and there are different approaches you can take. You could go to the Layers panel menu and choose Flatten Image. I'll click OK. And now the file size is simple six megabytes, and we only have one layer left in the Layers panel. This is very efficient, but we've lost all our flexibility to edit the individual elements of the cover separately. And also bad is the fact that all of our live text is now just pixels, making it impossible to…

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