From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Painting on separate layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Painting on separate layers

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- [Instructor] So far we have accepted the fact that everything we do on our digital canvas happens on a single surface. If we paint, with the brush tool for example, everything under our brush stroke gets covered up permanently. One of the biggest advantages of digital painting over traditional techniques is that we can also work completely non-destructively by applying paint on separate layers. Now is the time to open up the Layers Palette. Under Window I find Layers and this opens up the Layers Palette and in it, we see a list of all the layers that are in our image file. Currently, this is only the default background layer that every image file has to have because every image file has to have at least one layer. By clicking the little icon down here that looks like a sheet of paper we can add a new layer to our image file. By double clicking the name, we can give it a new name. I will call it Hills. And you might guess what I'm going to do next. I pick a nice green color and I will paint a nice stretch of grassy hills. Like this. There we go. As you can see, these hills were created on their own layer and I can use the little eye icon here on the side to hide the layer and now we can see that nothing in our background has been changed. Everything is still the same and if we click the eye icon again we can again see our little hills here. Well, let's create a new layer and let's just paint some nonsense here, something that we do not want to keep. The good thing is that we do not ruin our artwork here. Everything sits on its own layer and we can now delete this layer by simply clicking and dragging it in the Layers Palette and pulling it down right onto this trash bin here and if we release, the layer is deleted. So with layers we can work non-destructively. We can paint, make adjustments, without having to worry that the work that we have done before gets destroyed.

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