Lessons

Lesson Info

Advanced Photoshop Layers

So far, when we've used layers in Photoshop, we've stuck to the basics in general. There are many other features though that can push it a little bit more on the advanced side or are just things that are not very straightforward to discover on your own. So let's explore the more advanced side of layers. Let's start with this image where I've already placed a secondary image on a layer above. And what I'd like to do here is remove this background, but I don't want to have to make a selection and then hit delete or do anything else. Let's use the features of layers to do it to do that. I'm gonna come down to the letters FX at the bottom of my screen. And the topmost choice here is called blending options and it will send you in to this screen and let's just look at this lower area called blend if and just so, you know, there's more than one way to get to this, the way I just got to, it was to go to the letters FX and choose the topmost option. But you could also come in here to your laye...

rs panel And if you double click, not on the name of the layer, but to the right of that in the empty space out here that would also send you into the same place. And I think there's probably also another way up here under the layer menu, probably under layer style blending options. That's what this is. It's our blending options. So let's take a look at this area. It's known as the blend. If sliders and to really understand what it does, what I might do is first, I'm gonna create a new layer and on that layer, I'm going to end up making a gradient and I'll have a gradient in here that goes from black to white. All right, then let's go into those sliders. All I'm gonna do is double click to the right of the name of the layer and this comes up. Now you'll notice there are two sections, current layer and underlying layer. It really should say underlying image because it could be made out of multiple layers. It just means whatever the document looks like underneath the layer that's currently active. So when I move the leftmost current layer slider notice that it's sitting right by black and when I pull it in, look at what happens to black. Well, anything that is the shade of gray that this points at or darker will become hidden from this layer and they're not just shades of gray, it's just talking about brightness levels regardless of what color they were, let's put that back. And if I pull in the right side, that's gonna do the same thing. But in this case for the bright areas, so therefore I can make the bright parts of this layer disappear and reveal what's underneath. Then you'll notice that each of these sliders actually has a vertical line down the middle, that's to indicate it's actually two sliders that are stuck together. And if you'd like to separate those sliders, you hold down the option key which is al in windows and grab either side of the slider and just pull it away. And now it's gonna cause that to gently fade out. And so the way you can interpret this is anything to the right of this slider here uh is going to be completely hidden. Anything to the left of that slider over here will be completely showing up in all the shades of gray in between here is where it's gradually fading out. The brighter the shade is therefore the closer to this shade, it is uh the less it shows up, the darker the shade is and therefore the closer to this, the more it shows up. And so we can cause a gradual fade out and I can do the same thing on the other side where I just hold down the option key split that apart. So now the area over here would be completely hidden. The area over here would be the area that's completely showing up. And the area in between is where it's slowly fading out. And so we could just dial that in wherever we'd want, then we have underlying layer really meaning underlying image. And if I pull in this slider, it's gonna look at the dark areas of the underlying image and it's gonna allow them to show up to break through the layer I'm currently working on. And so I can get those dark areas to appear. And if I want them to have a more gradual transition, I can take this slider hold on option and split it apart to get a more gradual transition. I could do the same thing with the bright part of the image that's underneath. If I were to pull this over, then the bright areas of whatever's underneath are gonna show up and I could hold down the option key to split it apart to get a soft transition. So let's see what we might use these blending sliders for. I'll throw away our gradient. And first I want to have the background on this layer with the birds. I want to have it disappear. Well, all I'm gonna do is double click to the right of the layer name because that's gonna bring me in there and the birds are dark, the background is brighter. So I'm gonna bring in this slider right here. So it's gonna make the bright parts of the current layer disappear now nothing is gonna happen when I first pull it in because there's nothing in this brightness range that is to the right of that slider. But eventually I should be able to get to the brightness range where the sky is represented. And I could pull that over maybe about that far. And now the sky has disappeared, but we have an abrupt transition wherever the edge of that object is. And I can see kind of a little halo around it. And so I could either pull this over further to try to eliminate that halo. But if I pull it over too far, we're gonna start having portions of the birds disappear or I could hold down the option key and split that apart and then fine tune it to see if I can create a nice transition with those birds. Something about like that, I think click. OK. And now I could use my move tool to reposition this wherever I'd like. And now we got some birds going through the sky and I could always scale it by choosing free transform. Uh And many other things, the other thing I might want to do in this case is I want the birds to only be able to darken the sky. And I wanted to kind of pick up some of the, the color there. So I could also set this to multiply mode and then it is going to print like ink on what's underneath if I choose undo here's without multiply mode. If you look at the birds at the very top and here is in multiply mode, just might help a little bit to get it to uh darken up there. All right, let's close that image and let's move to this image. What I'd like to do here is use this little starburst in a different image where I kind of want to steal it out of this image and throw it into another one. Now, if I just use my move tool, I could click on this and I'm gonna drag up here to another one of my documents tabs and then drag down into that document. So we move it over to this file. Then let's try hiding the dark parts of this particular layer. So I'll go into my layers panel, I'll double click to the right of the layer name. I get the sliders and I'll tell it to hide the dark parts of the current layer and I'll bring it in until it seems to start hiding some of those uh little rays that I wanna keep. And that's when instead I'll switch to holding down the option key and splitting the slider in half and then pulling that over as well until I can get most of that background to be semi transparent that is surrounding it. I'll click OK? And it's not gonna do a perfect job because down here at the bottom, there was a reflection of the sun on the water that was down below. So I might just make a selection down here of the areas that were easy to remove the background on and just see a delete. Uh I might also need if I want to move this around to go over here because there was a building over there that also had some highlights on it. I can succeed a little bit showing up And I could also make a selection there and just hit delete. So then we primarily have in this layer if I use my move tool that but then what if I want it to look as if it's going behind this hoodoo instead of in front of it? Well, I could partially do that also using those same blending sliders when you've applied the blending sliders. If you look at the layer, you're gonna see an icon on the right side and that indicates you've done something in that screen where we had all the options we were looking at. I can double click on that icon, it'll send me back in. And now what I could do is cause the underlying layer or underlying image where it is dark to break through. And that's one way I could potentially get that Hoodoo to show up. But when I do the sky up near the top is also dark and so it starts disappearing. Well, there's a little bit more to this, you might notice there's a pop up menu up here and the default setting is set it to gray and that means it's thinking about these layers as if they were black and white photographs. And if you did this darker part of the sky would be similar in brightness to what's over here. But behind the scenes, your image is made out of three colors, red, green and blue. And here I can have it only look at the red, green or blue component of the layer. If you're not used to thinking that way, then I can click cancel here, then I can show you what it's thinking of. Let me hide this layer and just look at the image that's underneath. And then we can go to the channels panel because here it'll actually show me how much red green and blue the image is made out of. If I click here on the red channel, you can see that there's no red up here. Black means you have no it because talking about light uh there's no red here. If I go over here to green, this is what we get. And if I go to blue, this is what we get. Well, when I'm in the blue, you might notice there's an awful lot of blue in here because it's bright but probably not nowhere near as much over in here. So oftentimes one of these is going to cause it to separate a lot more. So than the others. And none of these will likely be perfect, but you can get it to look at one of these three images when it is evaluating the layers. So let's turn this back on. Let's double click over here on that little icon to get back in. And this time when we pull in these sliders, if I set this to, let's say blue, then I could say let's take the areas that do not contain much blue and let's let those break through the layer we're working on so that, that starburst does not appear there and so that could somewhat help this. So now it looks a little bit like that's going behind. It's probably not gonna be perfect though because there is a very bright area right here and a very bright area will have a lot of red, green and blue in there and there'll be other areas in here that have little, but at least it lets us somewhat separate those, but let's put that back so that we have just the starburst here. And let's see if there's a way I can make this permanent where we're not using that fancy feature of the blending sliders. Well, in order to get that to happen, what I'd need to do is create a brand new empty layer and put that layer underneath. Then I'm gonna click on the topmost layer and I'm gonna choose merge down when I choose, merge down, it's gonna try to maintain the appearance of what we have right now, but it's gonna do it on this layer that's below. That doesn't have those fancy sliders set up. So if I choose, merge down, I just go to the layer menu and right there, it's merged down, watch my layers panel, you see that symbol in the far right of the layer we're working on, which indicates we have those sliders applied. But when I choose, merge down, it suddenly combines with the layer that is underneath and that icon disappears. And that means if I double click on this layer, you're gonna find the sliders at default positions. And therefore, we've actually deleted the background on this particular um image and therefore I could hide here and I could see that it looks like a checkerboard in the surroundings and let's work on this one. Now, in this image, half of the color in the skin is completely artificial and I ended up colorizing half of the skin. And if you want to see what it looks like with just the color removed, then I'll just turn off this layer which is adding the color to the skin and you'll figure out which side has fake color there. What I have in here is the original photo on the bottom. Above this, I have a adjustment layer that would pull all the color out of the image and make it look black and white. It's got a mask on it. So it only does it to the skin and not to the hair and eyes and lips. And then up here at the very top is a layer mask that's limiting where this shows up. If I hold shift and click on it, it would let it go black and white all the way across her face. Then this is just what's known as a solid color layer. It's when you come down here to the adjustment layer icon and choose solid color. And I happen to choose a color from another photograph that represented a skin tone in order to get this color to apply to the image. All I needed to do was change this menu up here. The one called the bunny mode menu and I changed it to color when it's set to color, it means take the color from this layer and apply it to the brightness that is underneath so that this is not adjusting the brightness whatsoever. And if I turn it off, you'll see there's just the brightness and there it is with this. But in order to make it look at all realistic, I needed to use those blending sliders. Let me show you what it would look like. Had I not used them, I'll go in here and I'm gonna turn them off when they're off. Then what you'll find is usually there's way too much color in the dark portion of the image. If you look in this area right here usually will be too much color. Also, there will often be too much color in the bright portion of the image like up in here. So what I end up doing is I pull in this slider which controls the dark portion of the underlying image. And I'm saying, let the dark portion of the underlying image show through the colorization and I'm gonna bring it over until I see some of the colorizing disappear. If you look on the left side of her face, you're gonna find some of it disappearing, I'll back off until pretty much none of it has disappeared. So I've just figured out how far over I'd need to go to get it to start. Then I'll hold down the option key alton windows and I'll start pulling that over and look at those dark areas on the left side of the photo and also down below her chin. When I pull this over, you're gonna see a lot of that color being sucked out of there. I might bring this back a little bit if it's too much and I'm just trying to get it. So we're not getting the full force of the color here in the dark areas. I'm gonna do the same thing using this for the bright areas. If I pull this in, I'm gonna figure out where does the color start disappearing? If you look at her shoulder on the left side of the photograph when I get it to here, I see the color starting to disappear. I'm gonna back off on it until it's not disappearing out there. And that tells me kind of where I want to start. I'll hold down the option key, I'll split this slider in half and I'm gonna pull it over until a lot of that color starts coming out of that bright area. So right now I might look at her forehead and just say I want to get a little bit less color and I'm gonna pull it over until there's a little bit less up there. And sometimes you end up backing off on the other slider. But um there we go. So let me click. OK? And then I'm gonna go back in and reset these so that I can choose undue and show you the difference. Uh Here is without the sliders applied, I'll choose undue and here's with the sliders applied without look underneath the chin right by the edge of the neck and then with, and so I find that that usually helps when you colorize a photograph to make it look more natural. Although these days when you colorize a photograph, you can also use a neural filter to do it. It's just sometimes you need to manually add color to a particular area and I wanted to make sure you knew how to control how much of that color goes into the highlights and how much goes into the shadows. Now, let's look at some of the other features that were found in that same screen where we found the sliders. I'm gonna come in here and let's put in some text. I'm going to just get the size of the text to be large enough. And then let's apply a layer of style. I'll come down here and I'm gonna use one called BEV and Boss and we'll experiment with the settings here to maybe get the size. So it's not too high around there and I'll click. OK. Now, one of the things that was in that screen is up at the top here, we have the blending mode, then the opacity and then the fill opacity. Those are just copies of what you find over here in the layers panel where right there is the blending mode, opacity and fill opacity. If I change them here, all it does is change what's found at the top of the layers panel. But I find that most people don't seem to have a good grip for what's the difference between opacity and fill opacity. So let's find out on most layers. These two sliders are gonna look identical where it wouldn't matter which of the two you ended up turning down. But it's different when you've used a layer style like the one I did called Belen and Bloss. Let's see how it works. When I bring down opacity, it's gonna lessen the entire layer. So that once I get the opacity down to zero, none of the layer appears, when I adjust, fill opacity. On the other hand, then it's gonna take the true contents of that layer, meaning the text and lessen it. But it's gonna keep any effects that are applied to the layer at full strength. So when I bring this down, the red part of the text will start becoming lessened. But that bevel and emboss that's applied to the edge, it stays at full strength. So if I get it all the way down to zero, you're gonna find that you can't see any of the solid part of that text. We just have the effect defining where it is and it can be interesting if you do something like let's use a different one, maybe we can do an inner glow where you just get the edge of the text like that or you can try an inner shadow and it can look as if maybe it's uh recessed into the photo itself. I just might bring the opacity up, get a little bit darker, but that can make it a little more interesting for text. And that was adjusting what's known as the fill opacity. So if you look in the layers panel, you find the same two options here. And when I brought fill opacity to zero, that's all it did is adjust the one that's here. You'll also find that fill will affect some of these blending modes, a few of them a little bit differently than opacity. But other than that, other than the layer styles and the blending modes, uh you wouldn't notice a difference between the two. If you were using any other features, let's throw that away. And now I want to show you how on occasion I demonstrate uh that images are made out of red, green and blue light. And I do it by pulling the image apart into those components to do. So, I'm gonna come in here to my background layer and I'm just gonna rename it. And then I'm gonna create a new layer that is a solid color and I'm gonna make it black and we'll put that underneath as our little backdrop. Then let's double click to the right of the name so we can get into this screen and you'll notice that there are some check boxes here. There's one for red, one for green and one for blue. In most images are made out of red, green and blue, all three of those colors. But if I were to turn off one of these check boxes, it would show you what the image would look like if you didn't use any green light and I can turn off blue as well. So now it's only made out of red light. I click. OK? And what I would like to do now is simply have two other versions of this picture. I'm simply gonna duplicate this layer by typing command J, I'll go back into that same screen and I'm just gonna switch it from red to green. Now, what we have is one layer, the one below set to red and the one above set the green and the two are combining together. So when you have those two layers on top of each other, you're seeing the red and the green together, then I'm gonna duplicate this layer once more by typing command J, I'll go into that screen one more time and this time I'll have it set to blue. So now we have one layer, I'll rename it. That's using only red one that's using only green and one that's using only blue and then to be able to separate them apart, I'm going to select all those layers and I'm just gonna scale them down. So we have space to move them around. So I'm gonna type command T to transform and I just scale it down like that. All right. Now, as long as I move all three of the layers, it looks like a normal full color photograph. But if I were to highlight just one of the layers and then come in here and drag, you're gonna find me pulling out in this case, the green component, then I could click on one of the other ones like the red click over here. And now I'm pulling apart the red and what's left over is the blue. And therefore you can see that an image is really made out of red light, green light and blue light. It's almost like he had three flashlights. It's just that we're varying the brightness in the various areas of the image. And if I were to put these images right on top of each other, again, you would find that once you get all three of them, it's gonna look like a full color image. You could do the same thing if you wanted to demonstrate Cyan magenta yellow and black printing. For instance, the only difference would be you would want this bottom layer that's here to be white and you would want your picture to be in cmyk mode. You can change the mode of an image up here. There's cmyk that's Cyan magenta yellow and black and then you'd be able to pull these apart into cyan magenta yellow and black. You would find that when you're in this screen, there'd be four check boxes and they'd be listed as cmyk. And so I occasionally do that as well to show how printing works in that, an image is printed out of four colors. Well, then let's get kind of fancy with that and combine it with some other features and see if we can do anything interesting. Well, I'm gonna open the info panel and what I'd like to do is set up this image for printing on a printing press. And when you print on a printing press, it's not uncommon that if you have a shadow underneath something and that shadow is made by you instead of being an actual part of a photograph is it can be useful to print the shadow only using black ink. And therefore, if the inks are off a little bit on the printing press where one is printing a little bit heavier than the other colors, then the color of the shadow will never shift because there's no color in the shadow. Instead, it's only printed with black ink. And so right now here in the info panel over here, it should have a readout for cmyk unless you've messed with this. If you click on this eyedropper, you could change the measurement system being used. I'm gonna have it set to cmyk down here. You'll see if I hover over this right now. This would not be a black only shadow. In fact, if you look, it's got 65% Cyan in it, 57% magenta, 57 yellow and 35 black, well, would also cost less because you use less ink if we just printed that with black ink. So I want to set it up. So not only that shadow prints with black ink, but also this gray background, but I'm not ready to convert this full image to Cnyk mode yet because I want to use it for other purposes like on Instagram and other things where you need the image to be in R GB mode. So how can I do that? Because I don't want to merge these layers together and I don't want to convert the whole image to Cnyk yet. Well, this will only apply to those of you that print some printing presses. But let's see how fancy we can get. What I'm gonna do is I'll come over here into my layers panel. Let's deal with the background. First, I'm gonna take that layer that contains the solid gray background and I'm gonna come up to the layer menu. I'm gonna choose smart objects and I'm gonna convert it into a smart object. We had a whole separate lesson on smart objects, but you can tell this is a smart object by this little icon in the lower right corner. Then I'm gonna double click on the thumbnail for the smart object that's gonna cause it to appear in its own window. And now I'm gonna convert this into Cnyk mode. But before I do, I want to remember how bright it was and to do that, I think I'm gonna measure it just as if it was printed with black ink. That means I'll just go here and I can set this to measure gray scale, meaning what would this print like if you only use black ink, I'll just put my mouse right here and it says I'd use 37% of black ink. And so I'm gonna try to make sure I maintain that brightness 37%. I'll remember. All right, let's choose image mode cmyk. Then we get over to Cnyk mode and in this document, all you need to do is this layer is set up as one of those solid color layers. And when you have one of those, you can double click on this little thumbnail here and you can change the color. Well, I'm just gonna come over here to Cmyk and I think I wanted if I remember right, 37% and I'm gonna type in zero for the others. So that means we're not gonna use any Cyan, no magenta, no yellow, only 37% black. Then I'll click. OK? So now if I move my mouse over here and you look over there in the info panel, look at the Cnyk numbers. If I choose undo, you'll see what they used to be. And it used to be that they're only used 1% black ink almost none. But then if I redo, you'll now see that it's using none of the colors and it's only using black, then I'll close this and I'll save it. It's a smart object. So I'm saving it back into this document. So it just replaced the gray that is back here. Now, let's do something similar here with shadow. I'll do it in a different way this time just to show you that you have more than one method. You could use. We're still gonna come up here and convert it into a smart object and then we're still gonna double click on the little thumbnail to edit its contents. Then I could move my mouse on top of this and see how much black ink would be used. I see the number 66 up in the info panel. Then what I'm gonna do is double click to the right of the name of the layer. And here's where we have those check boxes right now. They say R GB though. And that's because we're still in R GB mode. So let's change the mode of this image to cmyk. And then if I double click to the right and layer name, you're gonna find cmyk and I could turn off Cyan. So we don't use any of that ink, turn off magenta and turn off black. So that now we end up with uh just black ink. Then all I need to do is make sure we're using about the same amount right now. If I hover over this, if you look in the info panel, we're only using 30% which is the co to 32% if you're thinking about a gray scale image and I need that to get higher. So I can just double click on the left side of this layer because I think this is a solid color layer and I'm just gonna bring this down to make it darker and move my mouse over here until I get closer to whatever that original was. I think it was 66. There we go. And I'll click. OK. And you can either do that based on the gray scale or you could, if you want an exact um amount of black ink, you could look at the K over there. So anyway, we'll do that. Now, let's close this and let's save it. And so those two layers are now special. They're smart objects and inside the smart object itself, what's in there is in Cnyk mode and it's set up to only print with black ink. But this document that it's used within is still in R GB mode. So if I move my mouse over here, it doesn't know I have those things set up. If I move my mouse here and I look in the info panel at the Cnyk numbers, I see that it thinks it's gonna use all those different colors of ink both here where the shadow is and out here where the background is. But watch what happens if I come over here and choose image mode cmyk, it's gonna ask me if I want to merge those layers together. And I'm gonna say no because I need to keep them separate. If I want it to remember that I wanted black only shadows in background I choose. Don't merge. It asks, hey, do you wanna raster the smart objects? That means turn it into a normal layer instead of still being a smart object, I'll choose don't raster. And now let's see what happened. Look at the background in the info panel, we're using only black ink and look at the shadow underneath here. We're only using black ink. It's it's usually impossible to force something to print with black ink when a document is still in R GB mode where you're doing your design work. But if you use smart objects and you convert the contents of the smart object into cmyk mode, it will remember those settings when the document as a whole is converted to cmyk. Now let's explore another setting that was found in that same dialogue box that offered us the Cnyk check boxes. What I want to do this time is convert this image to black and white, let's say come in here and there's more than one way you can make something black and white. Uh in here, you could go up to hue and saturation and you could just bring the saturation slider down. But that's not usually gonna give you a great looking result. If you look the things that used to be different colors, they're pretty much blending together. Well, let's say I wanna stack more than one method of converting to black and white. And then I want to be able to paint on the masks to determine where one method is used and where another is. Well, the problem is if I come back down here and I do another adjustment, let's say I do one that's called black and white. Well, this adjustment looks at what's underneath and all it sees is whatever it would look like underneath, which means it's seen what it looks like. When I turn off this eyeball, the image has no color there. So therefore, if I attempt to move these sliders to brighten the reds or to darken the yellows or whatever it is, you'd want to do. They don't do anything because the image has no hint of color in it when you look directly below this layer. So somehow I want this layer to be able to look all the way down here and see the full color information. How can I do that? Well, if I double click to the right of the layer's name, there's an odd option that's rarely used and it's called knockout knockout means let this layer poke a hole through all the layers that are found underneath it. And if you click here, you have two choices and this determines how far down it's gonna knock through the other layers. The knockout shallow choice is only gonna do something if the layer you're currently working on is inside of a group. Remember a group looks like a folder and right now, I'm not using groups. So this wouldn't really do anything if I choose knock out deep, then this layer that I'm currently working on is gonna knock through all layers that are below it until it hits a layer called the background. And that's what it's doing right now when I set it to deep. So if I turn off the middle layer, you'll see it's not influencing the results at all. So I could come into this black and white adjustment layer and I probably want to bring those yellows down. Maybe I want to bring the reds up and I could fine tune the look of what we have in here until I like it. But then there might be a portion of the image where I preferred the way it looked when I used the other method, which is this middle layer. Let's say that I preferred the greenery, the part that you know the stems and things from the layer that's underneath. Well, all I need to do now is this layer is poking a hole through this one to find the color information. But if I paint on the mask here, then this layer will become hidden wherever it is I paint and wherever it is, I paint will be the same as turning off this eyeball. And it will use this method instead. Therefore, you could have two different black and white conversion methods. And all I'd have to do here is paint with black on the topmost layer. And I'm going to allow the other black and white method to be used. I probably shouldn't use it where the colorful flowers are though, but that's how this is working. Well, let me show you a way. I actually use that kind of thing on a regular basis. I take a lot of photos of vintage service stations and here's an example. I actually own the bus that's sitting in there. And if you look at my layers panel, let me hide. What's there? Everything except for the original picture, which is at the bottom here, I've built up this image to make changes. Uh There's here a little group that has all my retouching in it. And so if I turn that on, you'll see all the stuff that I retouched out of this image. And I do extensive retouching to get rid of anything that's modern in these kinds of photographs. Then I ended up enhancing the image, meaning just uh isolating areas and adjusting them until I like the colors. And so I'm gonna turn on this group of layers to enhance the image and you'll see how some areas become uh more vivid and so on. But when I get to this stage, I find that the building usually ends up blending them with the background too much. And I want the building to separate and really stand out. And so what I end up doing is I add a black and white adjustment layer which is right here and let me turn that on there. It's making the entire image black and white and what I would like to do is do the equivalent to having a layer mask on this adjustment and where I could limit which areas are turning black and white and I could dial down uh how close to black and white an area is becoming. Well, usually when you have an adjustment layer, you just have one mask on it. And that's all you can use. But I like to be able to have more than one mask and I use knockout to do that. Let me show you how it's done. What I end up doing is I select an area. So let me get it back to color just so you can see me selecting an area and let's say I come over here to this tool and I select maybe this sign. Then what I would do is turn on my black and white layer and I'm gonna make a brand new adjustment layer above it. I could use something like levels or curves something where you don't get a change when you first apply the adjustment where it's just waiting for me to move one of these sliders to change the image, but I'm never gonna move them. So that is what some people refer to as an empty adjustment layer. That would be an adjustment layer that doesn't do anything yet, but it has that mask. The moment I created the adjustment layer, it filled in the mask and I can see a little hint of the mask there. That was where I had the sign selected. I'm gonna double click to the right of the name of the layer and this comes up and I'm gonna tell it to knock out, knock out means poke a hole through what's underneath. But I'm gonna not tell it to knock out all the way to the background. Instead, I'm gonna tell it to knock out shallow, knock out shallow means poke a hole through only the layers that are in the same group as the one I'm working on. So when I set it to knock out shallow and I click, OK, look that sign came back to full color because this adjustment layer which isn't actually adjusting the image, its little mask here thinks it's adjusting the sign because the mask has white there and that's what's causing it to knock right through the black and white adjustment layer. Well, you might think that's not a big deal because that mask could have just been on the black and white adjustment layer. Well, what I can do though is have more than one of these. And if I didn't want this to go all the way back to full color, all I do is I lower the opacity of the layer. So watch what happens to the sign of the far left of the image when I lower this, now you're gonna see it getting closer and closer to black and white and sometimes I do have parts of my image that I want just to look like it's where the color has been mellowed out and is going a little closer to black and white. So let me show you what I did here. First, I have this one, I called it. Look here and that's the one where my opacity is set to 100%. And therefore this is gonna completely remove the black and white effect. So let's turn that on and you'll see that I wanted the bus, the pumps and the sign and this little uh air compressor here to be full color. Then I went up here to the station. This has a mask in the shape of the actual building. But that one, when I turn it on, it is at 53% which means only get rid of 53% of this adjustment. Therefore, allow 40 what 7% of it to apply. And therefore the service station itself is not as colorful as it originally was. Then here I have one just for the trees and that one is set to only 37%. And that means it is removing 37% of the black and white. Therefore, leaving what would it be 63% of it to apply? And therefore the trees look close to black and white. I want just enough where you can tell what color the trees were. Then here, I haven't yet another one. This is one where I'm only reducing it somewhat and it's for a small area if I turn it on, I don't even know if you can tell, but that is working on just these little lamps up here because I didn't like how um close to black and white they were. And so here this is knocking out 77% of that black and white adjustment layer. So it can't apply all that much. And now I can fine tune all these areas. I can click on the one called trees and just click up here on opacity and decide. Do I want it to get more color by knocking through this more or do I want it less? Maybe I want it all the way black and white. I could dial it just until I can tell what color the trees are and therefore your eyes are not going to be attracted to the trees. I could come up to the one called station and I could decide that I want it to be more colorful or less whatever I'd like I can dial it in. But I find being able to have more than one mask and then be able to adjust the opacity to control how much of it is knocking through that black and white adjustment layer for me is very useful. So to summarize what I have is a black and white adjustment layer, that black and white adjustment layer is inside of a group. Then these layers up here are what you could call empty adjustment layers. That means they could be levels, curves, brightness and contrast hue and saturation. It could be any one of these that doesn't do anything until you've moved a slider and I never move the slider that's in there. But the mask that's there makes it. So when I use knockout, it thinks this layer was doing something and the mask was controlling where it was showing up. When you choose knockout shallow, it's just gonna knock through the layers that are found inside of this group. And therefore the only thing that's really knocking through is that black and white adjustment layer, it's not affecting any of this other stuff that's down below. And that gives me a tremendous amount of control when I'm working on a document like this one. And so that's a pretty advanced way of using layers. Let's get a few other interesting features, especially the way you combine certain features together. Here, I have a graphic and I have a magnifying glass and watch what happens when I move this onto the image. It's as if it's making the pixels bigger, making the image more pixelated. Well, how the heck do you do that? Well, I did this for a trade show where I was just trying to demonstrate that I'm using layers in weird ways and everybody was asking how the heck could you do that? Well, let's look if I look in here, the bottommost layer is the normal layer. That's what you see when the magnifying glass is not on there. Then I have the magnifying glass on top. And in between, I have two other layers. Let's take a look at what those are. We'll hide the magnifying glass and we'll just turn on this layer. All it is is a circle and that circle is the same size as the glass part of the magnifying glass. Then I have the other layer which is the pixelated version and it is clipped to the circle. If it wasn't clipped, it would just fill the entire screen. When you clip something you go to the layer menu and you choose create clipping mask and that causes the layer you're currently working on to only appear where there's information on the layer directly below it. And when you choose that a down pointing arrow appears, we've used that before. I think I used it to make a photograph show up inside of some text when we talked about layers. So I'm doing something like that, then you put the magnifying glass on top. So now the magnifying glass happens to line up with that circle and that circle is causing this pixelated layer to only show up in a small area. But we gotta do one other thing when I move the magnifying glass, that circle's gotta move at the same time I want this and the bottom layer to stay stationary. But when I move the top one, I need the circle to move as well. How can you do that? Well, you could click here, hold the command key and click there and just have both layers active like that, then you could just move it around, but I wanted it. So anytime I clicked on the layer that contained the magnifying glass, it automatically moved the circle layer. Without me having to remember to have both layers selected, we can do that when both of those layers are selected, just come down here to the bottom of the layers panel and click this little link symbol when you do these show up. And that means this layer is linked to this layer. So if I end up moving this or scaling it, then it needs to do the same thing to this other layer at the same time. And therefore I can move this around with only one layer active and get this to work. But this was just a little kind of teaser about how to mess with layers. And these days that link single bolt isn't used very often, but it is useful. All you gotta do is select multiple layers like here. Let me get rid of the background layer because it wouldn't work on the background. And I could also select this layer I could hit link and now it doesn't matter which of these two layers is active if I were to use the move tool, it would move them both choose undo. And if I want to temporarily disable that all you need to do is hold down the shift key and click on it. Now, I could move this layer independent of that one. For the length of time the X is showing up there. When I was done moving this layer, I just come up here, hold shift again and click on it. Now, they would move together once again or you could grab them both, click the link symbol at the bottom and now you've unlinked them. So now they're independent of each other. So that's linking with layers. And that's if you ever want two layers to ensure that they move together, it'd be nice if you had your original image at the bottom of your file and directly above it. If that's where you put your retouching, I then select the two layers and link them together. So you don't ever accidentally move the main image without having the retouching that needs to line up with it. Move along with it. Now, let's look at a feature that is known as a layer comp. If you come up here to the window menu, one of the choices will be layer comps. And if you open it up most of the time, this would be empty unless you've done some work ahead of time. A layer comp simply remembers which layers were visible at the time that layer comp was created. It also remembers the position of each layer and if there were any layer styles like Beverly and boss and drop shadow active at the time. And so let's see how you could create these and use them. Well, here is an example. We have a calendar and I wanna have all 12 months of the calendar here in one Photoshop file so that I get a simple just one file system. Well, up here, I have various layer groups where I could come in and swap out the picture at the top. And when I swap it out, it also has the month and it has some text for the location to describe it. And if you look, they're just separate layers. Here's the picture of Joshua tree, here's the text describing it and there is the month. Then if I were to hide that and move up one more, I'd have a different picture for a different month and a different description. And then there's another one for another month. Anyway, there's one for all 12 months. Then down here we have the calendar and I have separate layers for each calendar. Right now. I have the one for December visible even though the text is saying September. And if I turn that off and I turn on the one below, this is the one for November, October, September and so on. And I just wanna have it, remember which one of these calendars goes with which one of these groups up here so that we have the proper calendar and the proper month. So let's do that. I'm gonna turn off all these and let's first just turn on one of these. I'll go to the top one and the top one. I can't see the text right here because we don't have any black behind it. So let's turn on what we call the month bar. OK? That's January. I'm gonna come down here and find the January calendar and turn it on as well. So this is the setup I'd like to have for January. Well, then I come in here to layer comps. I hit this plus sign and you create a new layer comp, I'm gonna call it January and you can choose what it should keep track of right now. We've only been changing the visibility of the layers. And so that's all we need right now. But if you were repositioning the layers as part of this, then you'd want to have position turned on as well. You can also have appearance turned on. And that means layer styles like drop, shadow, devlin and boss and all that kind of stuff you could have it recorded. And if you wanted to get overly fancy and use smart objects, you can have layer comps within the smart object. And if you did, then here you could choose which layer comp should be used for that smart object that's pushing stuff way advanced. I've used it, but it's not something I'm gonna talk you into right now. Anyway, I'll just call that January and I'll click. OK, then if you want to switch to this layer comp to another one, all you need to do is click on this little square area next to one of the others. And if you do, it's gonna switch to that one. And if you watch my layers panel, each time I switch, it's gonna change which layers are visible. And so all of these were created at some point, they don't come with the document to begin with. It's something that somebody had to actually do the work with to get it to be set up that way. I'll show you another example. Let's say somebody hired you to design a business card. And here's an example, but you ended up designing more than one version of the business card because you weren't sure what style they wanted and you did it all in one file. And in order to create the various kinds of business cards, all you'd need to do is turn off individual layers to create the other versions. Well, once you get one of them set up, you could just save a layer comp and that's what was done here. Let's look at the three versions of this card. Here's the second version and here's the third version. And when I switch between these, if you watch the layers panel over here, you see drop shadow on my wife's name. And down here you see color overlay for the shape of the body. And when I switch between these, you can see that that drop shadow, this little effects eyeball ends up getting turned off. And this thing down here called the color overlay also is changing. That's because at the time this layer comp was created, this choice called appearance uh was turned on. If this thing was put in different areas, like for instance, these eyeballs, if these two circles were separate layers, you could make it. So the eyeballs are looking up in one and are instead in the lower right corner for another or a cross eyed. Because if these were two separate layers, you could position them there. And if that's what you wanted, when you create your layer comp, you would want this turned on. And therefore it would remember the position of those layers and they could be in different positions for each one of your layer comps. Then let's say I wanna update one of these when I'm on this layer comp that's in the middle. I see that we don't have that little uh darker edge that was here that I think was in there due to an inner glow. So in here I see this layer it says thought bubble, there's the effect called inner glow, but the effects as a whole are turned off. So I'm gonna click here when I click there, it makes it. So that layer comp is no longer active because now the appearance of the picture no longer reflects this layer comp. So that little icon that used to be there uh has moved up here, but we can update that layer comp. You have to be careful when you do though, you can right click on it. And there's a choice in there that says update layer appearance layer appearance would mean the layer styles. Whereas we could have also updated visibility in our position or if you need to update all of them, you just choose update. And that would mean all of these things. Now, when we do that though, I'm not gonna choose it yet. It's only gonna update the layer that's currently active and that's not the layer I changed. So I would need to come up here to make the layer that I've made the change to active. Then I could right click and choose update layer appearance. And now if I switch from that top layer C to the middle one, you'll notice that that little inner glow that's adding that dark edge to it. Uh isn't now included in the middle layer comp the little icons at the bottom, do the same thing as what you can do by right clicking. And if you look this would update the visibility, this would update the position, this would update the layer effects. And so on uh with these, you can also delete them by clicking here. I also use layer comps to make slide shows because I have a lot of complex slide shows that describe features in Photoshop that have mini screenshots with text and little call outs and things. And I use layer comps to hide various layers and show them uh to switch between the slides that I wanna show. Well, in order to do that, all I'm doing is clicking through like this. And when I have it set up like that, all I need to do to cycle through here is I don't need to click on each one of these areas where the icons could appear. That's what this is for. If you click that, it's just going to go to the next layer comp the next one, the next one so you could cycle through them. So if you had, let's just say 40 layer comps for 40 different slides, you wanted to present this button would let you present it. And the only problem with that is there's not a keyboard shortcut for this particular choice, but you can set one up if you go to the side menu of the layer comps panel in here, there is a choice called next layer comp. There's also one called previous layer comp and you can set up keyboard shortcuts for both of those you do it by going up here to the edit menu, choosing keyboard shortcuts. And in here you say shortcuts four and you wanna say panel menus, once you choose panel menus, then down here, it gives you a list of all the panels you could possibly have. And if you find the one called layer comps, this will list all those choices that you saw a moment ago from the side menu. And within there, you're gonna find next layer comp in previous layer comp. So right here I could type in a keyboard shortcut and I'm just gonna mash down all the modifier keys I can hold and then do the key that has a plus sign on it. And I'm gonna go for the previous one, I'm gonna hold down all the modifier keys and hit a minus. And therefore, as long as I mash down all the modifiers and do plus or minus, I could cycle through these. So let's click. OK? And now I don't need to have the layer comps panel open. If I wanted to give a slide show, I could be in full screen mode and all my panels hidden and all that. I just mashed down all the modifier keys and then hit plus and I can cycle through all of these. And if I go too far, I can hit the minus key to back up. So there you go some advanced techniques for using layers in Photoshop. It'll take you a while to practice and go through this lesson a few different times. In order to get comfortable with them, you are likely not to use them all. But a few people will find some of these to be just gems that really improve their work. For me being able to have multiple uh layers that ask act as masks to limit where my black and white adjustments uh are applied was a game changer. It was something that I use on all sorts of images these days, but it's not something for the faint at heart. You gotta be really comfortable with the features that are being used.