From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

The layered composition - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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The layered composition

- In this chapter, we'll take a first look at one of Photoshop's most powerful image creation tools: layers. Layers do not occur spontaneously. Every digital photograph begins life as a flat, no layered image file. In Photoshop, this flat image is called the background, and it is literally locked inside the four walls of the always rectangular canvas. But layers are easy to create. When you so much as copy and paste one image into another, the pasted image becomes an independent layer. This means that it can be any shape and size inside the rectangular canvas. This also makes it and any other layers in the document all together independent of each other. You can move and otherwise edit one layer without affecting another, making for a highly flexible, very nearly penalty-free image editing environment. Plus, you can introduce transparency. In a flat, full color image, a pixel may be one of several million colors at the very least. In a layer, it may also be one of several hundred levels of translucency. This permits you to see through one layer to another. Photoshop offers more than 30 panels, by which I mean screen bays of options. Some are great, some are okay. The layers panel is as good as all the rest of them combined. Is that an exaggeration? That's probably an exaggeration, but not by much. In Photoshop, a document that contains layers is said to be a layered composition. In this chapter, I'll show you how to create one such composition from beginning to end. Welcome to an early glimpse into the real power of Photoshop.

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