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Using Layers in Adobe Photoshop

Now let's get into one of the most essential features in Photoshop. And that is how to build up a document made out of multiple layers layers is what's going to allow us to have flexibility in working with Photoshop. It can be as simple as opening an image and then applying some retouching to it but making it so that re that retouching is not permanently applied to the image. Instead it's on its own layer, meaning it's something you could throw away and get back to the original picture or you could reposition or do all sorts of other things with. But the main thing is is it's not permanently applied and then we can get more complex. Let's say you want uh build a brochure cover and on that cover, you wanna have five or six images, some text, some little diagrams and things. Well, each one of those elements would likely be on its own layer. And that means you could reposition it, you could throw it away, you could replace it with something else and whatever it is you do nothing you do is...

permanent because each piece that you're building your image from is on an independent layer. So let's dive in and see how to work with layers. So start off with we're gonna make an image similar to this one. So in this case, when it comes to layers, the three images at the top each would be on a separate layer. The word Africa is going to be on a separate layer as is the photo that is contained within that text. Therefore, I could change the text to say something else like Spain and put a different photo in it and neither one is kind of permanently done. And then we'd have one other layer and that would be the texture that's in the background. So let's see how we can create something like this. So I'm gonna start off by just closing this document, then I can either click the new file button or go up to the file menu and choose new. They send you to the same spot. And what I'd like to do here is make a postcard. So I want it to be maybe a five by seven inch one. Well, I could come in here and choose print and see if they offer a five by seven or if I just don't have time to look over here. It's so easy over here to type in seven inches wide, five inches tall and 300 is fine for resolution. And I don't plan on making really radical changes to like the brightness or color of an image. So eight bit would be fine. Uh The other choice would be 16, but the file size would be twice as big and I wouldn't notice the difference in this case. Uh Then here just want us to know what to start with and white is fine. So I'll hit create and this is gonna be the basis for our postcard. And the only reason I started with a blank document instead of going and opening one of the files I wanted to use within it is I wanted it to be a very specific size. I wanted it to be a postcard. Therefore, I know if I go up here to the image menu and I choose image size, this will be exactly five by seven inches. And so now let's start populating this with some images. I have some if I go over here to bridge, waiting for us and I just like to use some of these, I probably won't use them all. Uh But let's grab one and go get it into Photoshop. So here's one, I'm gonna double click on it. It happens to be a raw file that means camera raw will open and in the lower right, I'm just gonna hit the open button which will send this image to Photoshop. All right, we got it here. Now, I want to get it into that other document and there are a bunch of different ways of accomplishing that. The first one would be, I could copy and paste it. But if you go up here to the edit menu, you'll find copy is grayed out because it doesn't know how much of the image I want to copy. If I want to copy the whole thing, I need to go to the select menu and select all because the selection tells it exactly which part of the image to copy. So I'll do that, select all and then I'll choose copy, then I'm gonna switch to the other document. In fact, I could close this one because the moment you choose copy, that image is being retained in a hidden area known as the clipboard. And now we can paste it into here. I just go to the edit menu and I choose paste and there's our image, but that image was much larger than a postcard. And so when it gets put in here, it looks huge. And when you first paste it in, it'll often have these little handles on here uh where I could grab a corner and pull on it to resize it like this. The problem is I can't see the handle that represents the right side or the bottom of the picture because it's way beyond the edge of my screen. Well, there's a trick and that is if you are currently what's known as transforming an image, which means changing its size, where you see these little handles on the corners, then you can come to the view menu. And in here is a choice called fit on screen most of the time. That means your document, this five by seven inch document. But when you're transforming something fit on screen will mean fit those little handles that are on the corners of whatever it is you're scaling. So that if they're much larger than your document, now, you could bring this in like this and I don't want this to fill the entire image. I'm gonna have it come down maybe to about like that big. So I'm gonna put multiple images in here. Now, when you're done changing the size of this, you can press return or enter and that kind of finishes the transformation. So it doesn't think you're in the middle of it anymore. And now that same choice called fit in screen is going to do something different. It's going to try to fit my document in the screen. It's only when you're transforming something and it's going beyond the edge of the screen that it does something different. So let's go get another image. We'll head over to bridge once again. And now what I'd like to do is use this one again. This is a raw file. So if I double click on it, I get camera raw in the lower right, I'll choose open. And here's a different way we could get an image over there up. Here's the move tool, the move tool is what you use to reposition a layer. So I'm gonna click anywhere within this document. And just so you know how it relates to the document. I'll click right on this statue's nose. I'm gonna click right there and I'm gonna keep my mouse held down. Then I'm gonna drag up this way and I have my mouse held down and I'm gonna go on top of the other tab, that's the other document up there and it brings it to the front. But I don't want to let go yet. Do you see where my mouse is right now? It's still in that tab. I need to put it inside this document anywhere inside here and it's gonna then end up in this document. But when I do that, I'm gonna move it. So the nose is right here and when I let go watch where the nose ends up, if you see this, it doesn't matter in our uh situation, I would choose, don't show again and then choose yes. What this really means is when I created my document, I don't know if you remember or not, but I told it to have eight bits and the document I'm dragging from has 16, but it's gonna look the same. So it doesn't really need to warn me. Photoshop is a tendency of warning you about everything. And if there's a don't show again button there, checkbox, most of the time, I'm gonna end up turning it on All right, you see where his nose is, is right there. That's right where my mouse was when I let go. So it does matter where you click within the initial image and where you let go. At least that's gonna determine the exact position of that image. You remember when we ended up copying and pasting, it ended up having little handles on the corners of our picture to allow us to grab them and scale the image and I don't see them right now here. Well, that's because we drag this image over and the corners of this picture are outside the edge of my screen. Imagine it's the size of the room I'm in and it's just way out there and it just happens to be that one of the corners is not in view. So I'm gonna do the same thing we did before go to the view menu and choose fit on screen and that should fit those little handles on my screen. Then I could grab one and start to pull to bring it in here. There is a trick for it that I use often when this is the case and that is if you ever grab one of these handles, if you after clicking on it, hold down the option key, which is all in windows, it will pull the opposite corner in equal amount and therefore the center of the image will remain where it is. So I'm gonna click here. And if I don't hold option, I'd do this and I'd have to then grab the other corner, I'll choose undo. But if I hold option after I click my mouse, it pulls the opposite corner in an equal amount. And oftentimes that is more convenient. So I'll bring that down. I can also click in the middle of it and reposition it when I reposition it. If it lines up with any of the other layers, you're gonna see little pink lines show up. So I know the tops line up right now, I'll pull it down until the bottoms line up. And then I could grab one of these other sides here. I'll grab this and I'll just pull it straight up until I see a pink line uh up there where the top of that other document is. So now I know these two images are the exact same height. Now, just to say I'm done, I usually press return or enter to officially finish uh transforming that image. All right. Now, what I'd like to do is put one more image in there. I'd like one image right here in the middle. So let's go back over the bridge and let's use this one. This once again is a raw file and I'm going to double click on it. I'm gonna choose open in the lower right. And we have the image. Now it's up to me if I want to copy and paste or drag and drop. In this case, I'm gonna drag and drop over here. Remember when you do though? You don't want to let go. When your mouse is on top of that tab, your mouse must be somewhere within the image. Then let go. And if you can't see those little corner handles, you can go up to that view menu. But the keyboard shortcut for what I was using is command zero. So if you do that a lot, you get used to it. But remember it was called fit on screen. Now, I'd like to resize that. And when I pull this in, I wanted to pull the opposite side as well. So when I grab this, I'll hold option and therefore it's pulling both sides in and I want to get this position. So it lines up at the bottom of those other layers, I'll then grab the top handle and pull up until the top lines up. Now, if I were to grab the corner and pull like this, it's kind of weird in that it doesn't snap. Do you see the pink line never shows up? I really wish it would. Uh but it's only when you grab the handle that would pull in the exact uh direction, only one direction that it would snap and right there, it just did. All right, then I'm going to reposition these, but I want to see the entire document. So I'm gonna type command zero, same thing as what we chose under that view menu. All right. When I put this in here, I'm just gonna move it like this and I'm in the move tool, the move to is what allows you to do that. So if you weren't in it already, that's usually what you want to be in. And with default settings, if I want to switch which image I'd like to work on, all you gotta do is click on it. So just by clicking on this picture within the image, uh it became active and then I could move it like that. But look at what happens when I moved it, you see the pink lines, the pink lines tell me that this document or this layer, I should say that I'm moving currently lines up with the top edges and the bottom edges of those other two layers and the center lines up. That's what that middle uh line is indicating. But then when I move to the right watch what happens when I get over here, just the right amount right there. Now it's telling me the amount of space there is between the leftmost image and the middle one is 32 pixels and it's matching the amount that there is between the middle one and the right one. That's what that little smart guide means with the pink that's showing up. So there I got evenly spaced and I like that. The only thing is this image is going beyond the edge of the document and I don't want it to. So now I want to move all three of these at once. So look in the layers panel, you'll see that each one of these is on a separate layer because whenever you copy and paste or you drag and drop between images or documents, I should say you automatically get a new layer. So what I wanna do is the topmost layer is currently active. I can tell because it's highlighted in gray. I'm gonna hold down shift and I'm gonna get this layer and that's gonna get all the layers in between. So now all of them are currently active. Therefore, I can click anywhere within those three within the image and move this around. Let's say I wanna move it up here near the top and maybe put it right about there. But then I want to resize it. I want a good amount of space over here on the right side similar to what we have on the left. Well, there is currently a setting turned on that I don't usually have turned on that is making these little handles still show up and therefore I can grab one of these handles, pull on it and I can attempt to resize that. Now I said that those aren't usually there. Well, I don't know if I'd say they're not usually there because with default settings they are. But historically, if you went back in time. That's a new change that they've made relatively um recently. And let me show you how you can change that up here in the options bar when you're in the move tool, uh there's a gear icon and when you're click on the gear icon, do you see this choice? Show transform controls, that's what's causing those little handles to show up. If I were to turn that off, then I wouldn't see those handles. And I personally prefer it to look like this because otherwise I always see these little handles. I wanna instead see what is my final document look like without any extra stuff that's not actually part of the document. And therefore I go to the gear and I turn that off and therefore you're not gonna see those handles that let you scale things. If you have those turned off to get them to show up, you don't go back up here. This would mean all the time, have them show up. Instead you go to the edit menu and there's a choice called free transform and you'll use it so often you'll get used to it. Just think of it as transforming in the keyboard. Shortcut is command T and a mac control T and windows. So if I decided to turn off that setting, now I'd have to type command T, then I would see those handles and I could come in here and resize this. But I kind of like the size it was at. So if you ever want to abort a transformation to say, I didn't mean to do that, just hit the escape key and therefore you'll abort it. All right. We got our three images in there so far. I don't need these other two documents that are showing up here as tabs. So let's click on one and I'll hit close by hitting the little X and don't save, hit the other one close and the little X and then I want to add some more pictures. I'm thinking three or four or five more. Well, it's inefficient for me to be dragging and dropping or copying and pasting. So let's go over to bridge and figure out how can I load more than one of these at a time and make it more efficient. Uh So I'm gonna grab, hm I'm gonna grab all these that I just uh selected and then I'll go to the tools menu and I'm gonna choose Photoshop and in there there's a choice called load files into Photoshop layers. If I use that, it's going to bypass camera raw and it's going to create a new layer for each one of those documents. And the only thing about it is that happens in a new document. So it's not in the same document we've been working on. But if you look in the layers panel, we now got a bunch of layers and the names of those layers match the file names of the images that I had selected. So I now want to move all of these over to that document we've been working on. So to do so I have the topmost layer I active a hold shift and click on the bottom one. And then I'm gonna use the move tool and I'll just click within anywhere in here and I'm gonna drag up to that other tab. So it comes to the front and then remember, don't let go. When your mouse is on the tab, you gotta have it within the image, then I'll let go. And now all of those images just got transferred over to this document. But we turned off a setting up here called show transform controls. And that means it doesn't think I want to scale them right now. If I type command zero, it doesn't suddenly zoom out where I can see those handles. So therefore, if I want to scale these, I need to go to the edit menu and choose free transform or just type command. T now those handles are showing up, they're just outside the bounds of this document. So I'd have to type command zero to see them. And I'm gonna grab the corner and I'll use that same trick I showed you before to move the other corner in equal amount. And that is you click and then you hold option keep option held down when you're dragging. And once you get it to the size you want. Let go of your mouse, then you can let go of option. Uh I can press return or enter to say I'm done if I'd like and then I can zoom up on my document. I'm just gonna use command zero, the exact same command we've been using every single time to mean fit in window. All right. Now let's move these around. So I'm gonna click on the topmost one here and just drag it over and right now they're all moving. And that's because over in my layers panel, if you look at what's active at the moment, you're gonna see that all those layers are highlighted. If I don't want them highlighted, I could click maybe here because that's outside of where all those images are and suddenly they're no longer and then I could come up here and grab individual ones and let's just move them around to see what we got. I'm just clicking within each one and just sliding it wherever I want. Yeah. Now the reason why I can just click on an image and start to move it like that is there's a setting turned on in the upper left of my screen and it's called auto select. And what that means is whenever I click the mouse look directly underneath where my mouse is positioned. And if there's a layer underneath there that contains anything, then make it active. So watching my layers panel, I'm about to click on this. We'll figure out what layer it's on because the moment I click, it becomes active, then it can reposition it. Well, that's something I personally don't like. A lot of other people must because they made it the default setting a while ago. But the problem I have with it is what if I take this image here and I move it. So it's completely covered up by the image that's on top. And I don't want to move the image that's on top. I wanna move the layer that I was working on over here, this layer right here. But the problem is the moment I click my mouse button, it's gonna look underneath my mouse and say is there anything there? And if it is the topmost layer that contains something will become active and it's gonna switch what layer is active. In fact, it previews it over in the layers panel. Do you see the layer highlighted in blue? That's what it's about to become active if I click. Whereas up here over there, it's always a different layer that would become active. How would I supposed to target the layer that's underneath? It's already active. It's the last layer I worked on and therefore it's still sitting there. Well, if I have auto select layer turned on, I can't. So I'm gonna turn auto select layer off, which is my personal preference. I never come up here and actually click on that check box, but I still use auto select layer because there's another way to access it. But before I show you that, let me first come in here and see if now I can click here and drag and you see that I could move that layer. So how can I use auto select layer? Even though the check box at the top left of my screen is turned off. Well, there's a shortcut. Adobe loves using keyboard shortcuts for all sorts of things. And let me show you what that is. If I hold down the command key that's controlling windows and then I hover over a layer and I click on it. Look at what just happened in my layers panel, watch, I'll do it here. I'll do it over here. I'll do it over there. It makes the layer the topmost layer that has something underneath my mouse active. It does the exact same thing it is having auto select layer turned on. And in fact, while I'm holding down that command key, look at the auto select layer checkbox here, I'll hold it down and you see it's on just for the length of time, I'll hold it down and I'll let go and it turns it off. And therefore I don't have to have it automatically switching layers on me unless I really want it to. So that's how I use it. You have to be in the move tool and then you hold on the command key and click. And that means switch to that layer. If you don't, then if I click up here, it's not gonna switch to this layer. It's gonna take whatever layer was currently active and just move it. And that's the way I like it to be set up. All right, there's too many layers in here. I can't really see what's going on. So let's uh clean this up a bit. What I'm gonna do is over here, my layers panel, we have eyeball icons. I'm gonna click on the topmost eyeball icon and I'm just gonna keep my mouse button held down and drag down to about there because I think those are all those new layers that I brought in. So now we just hid a bunch of layers and let's come in here and turn on my texture. I want that texture to be underneath all the photos that we put in here. And right now you can tell it's on top. Well, when you look at the layers panel, just think of it as if you're standing up here at the top of the layers panel and you're looking down and the first thing you would see would be the topmost layer. And if it's covering up anything on the layers below, it's gonna obscure your view of it, it's no different than having a stack of books on a table and the topmost book of the stack makes it. So you can't read the name of the book below it because it's covering it up. Well, just like having a stack of books on a table, we can change the stacking order that's here. So I'm just gonna click on the name of this layer and I'm gonna drag. And when I do, I see a blue horizontal line in my layers panel previewing where I'm about to put that and I can see the image update live and I think I can put it right there. Then I'd like to change the size of this. I wanted to fill the document. Well, to do that. I remember I turned off that thing called show transform controls. And that means I have to come up here and choose free transform. But from now on, I'm just gonna type command T because it's a keyboard shortcut, you really should get used to. So command T makes those handles show up and I can pull them out like this and tell that image makes it all the way up there. I could pull it down here to make it. So it fills the whole vertical area within the document. You can click near the middle to move it around. And I think it can now fill that image press return or enter oops, I can move it up a little bit. There we go. All right. Now let's turn on some other layers that we currently have hidden and see how we might incorporate them in here. And in fact, I think I want to put some text in. So let's go to the left side of my screen here are our tools. I'm gonna choose the text tool and I'm gonna click right here in the middle of the document like that. And then I'm gonna type in where these pictures were taken, which is spain. If I want to change the formatting on the text, I first need to select all of it. Uh So I'll type command a that's control A and windows. And then over here on the right side of my screen in this area called properties, I can change the settings for the text right now. The text is set to be aligned in the left side and that's why it's showing up where it's touching the left edge of where I had clicked when I decided where it should be. I want that to instead define the center. So I just chose the center icon and then up here, we have the text size and I'm not gonna deal with this number or if you click on this arrow, this pop up menu. Instead, I'm gonna click on the icon for it over here and I'm just gonna click and then drag to the right and that's gonna change the number for me and I'll bring it up until it's about what I want somewhere around there. And uh yeah, I think that's great. I the font is fine. So now I'm gonna use my move tool. Gotta make sure I'm in there because the move tool is what allows you to move things around and let's put that down here at the bottom. And then I'm thinking it's a bit on the large side. So what I might want to do is maybe put an image on each side or put an image inside. We can do any of those. Uh Let's see if I have an image that might look good inside. That'd be kind of fun. If we had that inside, we don't have to use the whole of the image, but maybe the middle part there. So what I'm gonna do is is reposition, not the word spain because right now I clicked right here and I assumed that that layer was gonna become active so I could move it. But remember we turned off a check box up here called auto select. And if you have that turned off, then it no longer automatically changes which layer is active. And what you need to do to make a layer active is if you can visibly see the layer somewhere on your screen, hold down the command key and click on it. That's gonna use auto select just for that moment and I could reposition this, then I want to resize it. I want to make it bigger uh to do. So I'm gonna type command T and then I'll grab one of these corners or I'll grab the top so I can bring it up and get it as tall as the text. I'll press return or enter and then I can move this around now just so, you know, scaling something up so it becomes larger is, you know, if you had made it smaller previously, is gonna make your image look soft and I can start to see that here later on, I'll show you how to use something called a smart object and that would cause it so I can scale an image down and I can scale it back up to be larger. And when I do, it retains the quality of the original, but we haven't talked about that feature yet. So I'm just gonna have to deal with the fact that this looks a little soft. So now let's use a feature we haven't talked about yet and that is known as a clipping group. What a clipping group does is it says let's take the layer that is currently active and let's make it. So it only shows up with a layer directly underneath it contains stuff. And if the layer underneath it has any empty areas, we'll hide this layer. So first over here in the layers panel, I need to move this layer, I need to move it up or down in the stacking order until it's sitting directly above the text. Because whenever we do what we're about to do it always looks directly underneath and that's where I wanted to find text, then you can go to the layer menu. And in the layer menu is a choice called create clipping mask. And when I do that watch what happens now it shows up inside the text. And if you look at my layers panel, you'll now see that that layer that contains the picture has a little arrow pointing down to indicate this is clipped to what's underneath it. If I didn't want it to be that way anymore, I go to the layer menu and I would choose down here, release clipping mask and it would go back to normal. There's another method for doing the exact same thing and that is if you come in here to your layers panel and you go right to the line that separates the layer you're working on with the layer that's under it. You can also hold down option and click and that would do the same thing. That's how I usually do it, but I doubt you're gonna remember. But once you get, you know where you've done this dozens of times, you're gonna find that to be faster than heading up to the menu each time. All right. At this point, what I'm not liking about it is the image is feeling really flat. I want it to feel as if the text and the pictures that are here are kind of floating above the texture that's there So let's figure out how to do it. I'm gonna go to one of the pictures that is at the top. I can do that either by holding down the command key which temporarily turns on auto select and clicking on one or I could come here in my layers panel and simply click on whichever layer I want. If I'm not sure if this is the right layer, I just go to the eyeball, turn it off, turn it on and you can tell if that made the area you were thinking of disappear or not. So that's the one I'm gonna add a drop shadow on a drop shadow is going to make it feel like this is more floating again above the background to do. So you go in your layers panel and down at the bottom, there is the letters FX. And if I click there, you're gonna find a bunch of effects that could be applied to that layer. For instance, in there is a choice that's called stroke, stroke will add a line around the edge of layer. So I'm gonna choose that. And let's see up here is the size, I'm gonna bring it up, not just one pixel, maybe two or three. So it's a little easier to see and you can tell it should it go on the inside of the photo, the outside of the photo or centered on the edge? And right down here, you can choose a color and I think black is fine, so I can click, OK, I can return to the same menu, that little FX and one of the other choices within it is called drop shadow. And that's really what I wanted to use. So we'll use that and this comes up with a bunch of settings and you can determine what the drop shadow looks like first by adjusting this thing called distance. So if you look up where the image is, when I adjust the distance, you see the shadow moving further and further away, you can also adjust this, which is the angle. You can either type in a number or just deal with the dial that's here. And that means what angle should it act as if the light is coming from? And I usually like mine uh as if it's coming from the upper left, that's what they use in video games and things. And so your eyes are used to that in computer interfaces, but you don't have to adjust the distance and the angle with these controls. As long as you're looking at the controls for a drop shadow, you can just click on your picture. And if you do, then it's gonna adjust the distance and the angle based on how you drank. So that's how I usually do it. Then here's a choice called size and this determines how blurry the edge will be if you want it to look as if something is floating high above a background, then you want a soft drop shadow. If you want it to feel as if it's almost touching that background, then you want a more crisp edged shadow. But then you would also want to adjust the distance. If you want it to feel like it's close to the background, you want to snug it up really close to the original image. And if you want it to feel like it's floating above, you need to have this further out. So it's kind of a combination of those two. But I'm gonna go for what I have here. Finally, there's opacity and that determines how much we can look through our shadow. And if we bring it up, it's gonna just become a black shadow. And if we bring it down, you can see through it more. So I'm gonna go for somewhere around there and then I'll click. OK? But I'm not gonna remember those settings to apply to this image. So let's get this image to be active. I'll just click on it in my layers panel and sure I could go down to FX and I could go to stroke once again and it looks like it's remembering the settings of three pixels and I could go back down there again and I could choose drop shadow and let's see if it looks the same. Yes, it remembered the last settings I used. But there's another way if you look in the layers panel, whenever you add those effects, you're gonna see a list of them right here. It tells me there's a category called effects. And then there's two effects, a stroke and a drop shadow. And if you don't want to see that because your layers panel is starting to look cluttered, there's a little triangle over here where you could collapse it and then you just see the FX on the right to tell you it's there and you'd have to click the triangle to see what the actual effects were. Well, what's cool is you can actually drag and drop these watch. What happens if I click on the word effects, effects means all of the things that are found indented from that. And I just clicked right there and I dragged it to here to this other layer and let go. Well, look at what happened up here. It just moved them from this layer over to this one. Well, there's a way to get her to move a copy and that is to hold down the option key alton windows. I have it held down right now and then I'll drag it up to this layer and now instead of moving it, it copied it and pasted it up there, but it's looking kind of busy in here. So I'm gonna collapse down those on two of those layers. Then I want to do the same thing here for the word Spain. But when I do I want it to have the drop shadow around the text shape, not around where the bounds of that photo originally was. So when I come over here to the word effects and I hold down the option key to say I want to move a copy. I'm not gonna drag here to where the picture is because that picture is a rectangle. And I don't want a drop shadow around the rectangular shape of the picture. I want it around the text. So that's where I'm gonna let go and it applied it to the text. I can then collapse down these things with those little triangles to make it look a little cleaner here in my layers panel. But it just happens to be that if you put an effect onto a layer and you have something clipped to it, it does the clipping part first and then it puts the effects on. Then that's why the little stroke still shows up here and it's not being covered up by the picture. So anyway, we started to build up this image. Now, these other images that are in here. I actually don't think I need them. So I could just drag them to the trash. If I just click on one here, you could turn on the eyeball to see what it is, but I don't need that. So I'm just gonna drag it down here to the trash can and it'll be gone or you can go up here to the upper right of the layers panel and click on the little hamburger menu that's there. And you're gonna find a choice called delete hidden layers. And what that means is delete any of the layers that have the eyeballs turned off and the top three layers have the eyeballs off. Those are images I don't currently have visible. So I choose that and it'll ask you you really mean to do that. And they love to say, did you really mean to do what you just asked me to? So I choose, don't show again and say yes. So now we've simplified this document, but now why don't we go into our layers panel and at least name our layers. So let's see up here, the topmost layer. If I turn off the eyeball, it's the middle photo. So I'll double click on its name. That's how you rename it. And I'm gonna call it middle photo. Then let's go to the next one down. I'll turn off the eyeball. That's the left photo. Let's double click on that, call it left photo. And if you were going to rename a bunch of layers, which you rarely are gonna do in an order, but you could hit tab and when you hit tab, it brings you down to the next layer and I'll call that one right photo. I'll hit tab that one. I wanna keep, that's the name of the original file that was used we can hit tab tab. No, I don't need to name those because I don't mind them being named what the original photos were named. But that tab thing to switch between layers only works if you're actively editing the name of a layer. So if I just clicked on the layer hitting tab, it's not gonna do that. I have to double click so that the text is being edited, then you could tab through to the others. Then let's say I was a little sloppier when I put together this document and I didn't have the top edges of these lined up. And I didn't pay attention to the smart guides and get the gap between these layers to be exactly the same. So I'm gonna mess it up. I'm just going to make this layer active. I'll do that using auto select, which means I'll hold down the command key and I'm just gonna move these around a bit and now let's figure out how we could have gotten them to line up using other things. Well, I'm gonna make all three of these layers active and I could do that on my layers panel. The topmost one is currently active. I could hold shift and get the rest or let's say none of those are active. I could instead use a trick and that is with auto select layer turned on which can be by just holding down the command key like I do it, I could click on one layer. Then when I come over here, still having the command key held down, we're usually clicking here would switch to this layer. I could just hold shift as well. And so if I hold command for auto select and I add shift, it means toggle that layer as well. And so my layers panel, you'll now see I have two layers active. And if I do the same thing over here, holding command to get auto select and holding shift to mean grab it that one as well. Now I have all three and up here when you're in the move tool, you're gonna find these icons, they'll be grayed out if you only have one layer active, I think. But when you have multiple layers, this icon here means align them all on the top. So therefore if I click it, you see that they all went where they align, I could align them on the left centered or on the right or top centered vertically or bottom. And then we have this thing which is distribute them vertically or this, which is distribute them horizontally, distribute when I click on it is what's going to give me an even spacing between them. So now they're distributed across that space evenly. And so that's how I could have done this, but then I probably wouldn't have had the heights exactly matching and all that. But it's nice to know that those are there and I think you might even have more options if you come up here to the layer menu. And in there, you're gonna find the choice of a line and these are the exact same icons you just saw and you also have the choice of distribute. But when you say distribute, you now have multiple ways of doing it. So before we only had these two options, when you're on the options bar and there you have others. So we have those. Uh you also have a choice in here called arrange. And if you remember when I dragged layers up and down in my layers panel to change the stacking order, this is where you can do the same thing using a menu, you can bring something to the front. And therefore all three of the layers that are currently active would get moved to the top of the layers stack or I can send to back. And now if you watch my layers panel, look at the three layers that are active, you'll see them, they will have moved to the bottom. Nothing can be below this layer called the background. And that's why I didn't go below it. Uh And I could go back up there and remember it was under layer and it was called a range. And I'm gonna bring to front. If I didn't want to go all the way to the front, I can say bring forward and that would bring it one layer further up. So if you look in the layers panel, you see it just went above the textures and that kind of stuff and that's fine where they are right now. Now I notice a little defect in the texture that I have in the background and I'd like to retouch it out. So what I'm gonna do here in my layers panel is I want to get all the pictures that are on top of the texture to kind of go away temporarily so that I can just concentrate on the texture. And there's a couple ways of doing that. I've already shown you that you can click on an eyeball and just kind of drag up through the others like that. But there's a quicker way. Sometimes you're gonna end up with dozens and dozens and dozens of layers. And if so then clicking and dragging like that can be a little bit of a pain. If you want to view only one layer and nothing else, then go to its little eyeball. And there's a trick if you hold down the option key, which I have held down right now, that's Alton Windows. You can click on it and that means hide everything. But this if you option click on it a second time, it brings back all of the layers that were previously visible. That doesn't mean it brings back every single layer. Let's say that I hid one of the layers like that one Now, if I come to the layer that contains the texture and I option click on its eyeball, it will still hide everything except for this layer. But when I do it a second time, it will remember that I had that middle photo at the top hidden. And therefore when I option click a second time, it doesn't bring that back. So it's not making all layers visible, it means make it back to the way it looked before I initially option clicked. So anyway, I'm gonna do that just so I can see this because I can see where I want to do a little bit of retouching. But when I do my retouching, I have two ways I could do it. I could come over here and grab a retouching tool like the spot healing brush and I could just go over here and do this and it would retouch but look at what's active in my layers panel. It's the layer that contains the texture and that means that that retouching is part of that layer so that the retouching is not independent from the original texture and I want it to be. So I'm gonna choose undo a couple times to undo that retouching. And then I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer to put my retouching on. And I'll do that by clicking this icon to create a new layer. Now, I have an empty layer. I might as well name it. I'll double click and call it retouching and then I'll go back to my tool but watch what happens when I attempt to use it, I'll come over here and it just doesn't seem to work. And that's because with default settings, if you come up here to the options bar, there's a setting in there called sample all layers. And with by default is turned off when sample all layers is turned off, it thinks that the only layer that it should pay attention to is the one that's currently active. Well, I just made that layer, that layer is completely empty, there's nothing in it. So if that's all it can see, it's as if I option clicked on that eyeball and this is what it's retouching. A checkerboard means an area that is completely empty and that's what it thinks the entire document contains because that's the only part of the document it could see. But if I turn on sample all layers, it should really be called sample all visible layers. Because if I have any layers hidden, it's not gonna see them. But now I can do the retouching like this because it does need to see what's in that layer that's underneath, that contains our texture in order to know what kind of stuff am I supposed to put in there, what should it look like? It should look like that texture. But since we did this on a separate layer, now what I could do is I could turn off the layer that contains the retouching. That's the layer I'm currently working on. And if I turn it off, you're gonna see the untouched texture underneath it, turn it back on or I could hide the texture and you'd see just the spots where I retouched because they're independent. They're just sitting up there at the top, I'll turn that back on. So there I like that better and then we can turn on the other eyeballs. There are many different ways of doing it. I'll just click and drag up to do so. Now this background down here, you don't have to have a background. The background layer is an odd concept and it's kind of an artifact of earlier times in Photoshop that they could Adobe. Uh they could get rid of the concept of the background if they'd want to. I kind of wish they would, but let's figure out what the heck is it? Well, the background, some could call the background layer but it's not really a layer. Um a layer is something you can reposition and we can't reposition the background and with a layer, when you reposition it, you can have it go beyond the bounds of the document. So it sticks out beyond the edge of the document. Well, the background layer can never extend beyond the bounds of your document. Also, you can never have something below the background layer. It's always stuck at the bottom. Also on a normal layer, you could grab the eraser tool and erase part of the layer and it would go away and you would see whatever is under it. But you can't do that to the background layer. If you ever try to erase the background layer like with the eraser tool or you make a selection and hit delete uh you get your background color appearing there. And so it has all these limitations. And the reason why it's there is because if all you have in a document is the background there and nothing else, then that particular document could be saved in just about any file format. Because file formats, most of them have the same limitations as the background there, file formats other than Tiff in Photoshop that is Tiff in Photoshop can handle all the normal layers. And but if you use JPEG, if you use Ping, if you use GIF, if you use all sorts of other file formats that are semi common, they can't handle any of those things that I just described where you have multiple pieces which would be layers that you have anything that goes beyond the bounds of your document, you have anything that is like transparent or things like that, most file formats couldn't handle. So whenever you open an image that is just a normal image you haven't messed with ever in Photoshop, you always get a background and that tells you that hey, you could save this in just about every file format if that's all that shows up in your layers panel. But the moment you start adding layers above it, now you can only save in Photoshop or Tiff if you wanted to retain all those pieces. And if you wanted to save in any other file format, uh it would usually have to merge those pieces together into one chunk. And usually when you do that, it's known as flattening your image and what you end up with is something called the background. Uh But it's kind of weird that it's there and all that. So you don't have to have a background. And just when you create a brand new document, you might have one. And if you end up putting stuff in there, like I did the texture that's in this image, there's really no need for it because I have something that fills the entire width and height that's completely covering up what is currently in that background. So we didn't have to keep it. So let's take a look. So to get rid of the background, uh you could just change its name, double click on it to start to change its name. This little lock symbol would go away and it would become a normal layer or you could click on it and just drag it down here to the trash that would get rid of it. Or another thing we could do is click on the layer above. And there's a way to combine layers together. If you go up to the layer menu, there's a choice in here called merge down. And that means take the layer I'm working with and combine it with the one directly below it. And so if you look at the layers panel, when I choose, merge down, that just became the background, it merged with it. Uh And so we could do that just like if I wanted to make this retouching permanent where I could no longer turn off its eyeball to disable it. I could choose merge down and it would combine with what's underneath and it would no longer be this independent piece. But I want to retain as much flexibility as possible. And therefore I leave things as layers because then I could move this picture or I could replace it with a different picture, that type of thing. All right. Now, let's just do something a bit different. What I would like to do now is kind of dot this eye with a circle that looks like it's a kind of a shiny three dimensional ball. If you want to know what I'm going for, I think I have one in bridge. If I scroll uh over here right here, I wanna make something similar to that. And so let's figure out how to do that. The first thing I need is a circle. Many different ways I could create one I could make a selection with the elliptical marquee tool to isolate around area. And after doing so I could, and by the way, when you're doing this, if you want a perfect circle, hold, shift, if you hold, shift it constrains it, uh if you're doing a rectangle, it would constrain it to a square, then I could fill that. I could go to the edit menu. There's a choice called fill. But before I did, I wouldn't want to be working on this layer called retouching. Otherwise it would be on the same piece as the retouching and I couldn't really easily separate the two. So I create a brand new empty layer, come up here and choose fill. And actually, before I do, let's choose a color, let's change my foreground color. Uh Let's make it blue and then fill with my foreground color. All right. So that's one way I could create a ball. And if I didn't need the selection anymore, I'd come up here and choose deselect. But you see all the steps we needed new layer selection, choose the color you want fill. Well, there's a shorter way of doing that. And that is coming right over here to the shape tool with the shape tool, we can choose from these shapes, the bottommost one where it says custom would allow you then to come up here in the options bar and choose from a whole bunch of shapes. If I do this and you can load more of these in uh and download them from other people, that kind of stuff. So that's what you can get with a custom shape. But all I need right now is a circle so I could choose this. And then before you end up using this tool up here at the top, you gotta choose what kind of result do you want? And these are your choices, pixels would end up delivering the result that we currently have that I made manually that blue circle that's there right now, that's made out of pixels, meaning it's just an area that's been filled in. Uh a path is something that you would use for other purposes. And a shape is what we want to use. That's the most versatile up here. It says, do you want it filled? And if so you'll see the color there, which will usually be your foregone color. Uh You could click there though and choose a different color from presets or you could choose this, which means no fill whatsoever because you can also have a stroke which means a line around the edge just like we have a line around these photos. And right now it's set for black with one pixel in size if I click there though. And I don't want a stroke, I set it to this and that means no stroke. Uh So we're gonna get this color with no stroke. Uh Then I can just click on my image. And so click drag and hold shift if we want it to be a perfect circle instead of an oval. And now I have that, but this is more versatile than the other version we had. Because this one if when it's active, I go to the right side of my screen, I could still add a stroke to it. And right here, I can change the fill color to whatever I want by choosing or changing the settings that are over here. And this will retain its original quality if I were to scale it down to the tiniest of sizes like that. And then I were to command T for transform and scale it back up. I'd want to hold sh well there this uh e even if I made it huge, it would still have the highest quality of an edge. Whereas if I take the one I manually made, which I just clicked on and I typed command T to transform it and I make it tiny press return. And a month later I decide I'm gonna transform it again and make it big again. It's not gonna look good when I'm done. And that's because it was made out of pixels. And when I scaled it down, we had fewer and fewer pixels. So when I scaled it back up, it had a lot less information to work with. It just looks terrible. Let me throw that away. But when it comes to this version, I can scale it to any size I want and it will always retain the same quality of an edge. I'll just use my move tool to move it into position here. And that's because it's what's known as a path. Uh or a vector is the technical term for it. It's like a description of a circle instead of a bunch of little squares that happen to make up a circle. So if it's just a description of a circle, you could scale that up or down. And if it's still, it just says circle of this size, then it would still look good. And that is the case here. All right, then I wanna make this look kind of 3d ish. So I'm going to create a brand new layer on top. I'm gonna grab my paintbrush tool and I'm gonna use a soft edge brush and let's make it. So the color I'm painting with is black and I'm just gonna paint like this now that paint goes beyond the circle, but I put it on it's a layer. So if you look in my layers panel, here's the circle and here's the paint. Well, just like here we have a photo only showing up inside the word Spain. I want that paint to only show up inside of the blue circle. So how did I do that before I went to the layer menu? And I chose create clipping mask and that takes the layer. I'm currently working on and clips it to the one that's below. So now that looks somewhat like a shadow like a shading of a, a 3d ball. Then I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna get my foreground color to be white and I'm just gonna add a little dot Right about there. It might need a slightly smaller brush, maybe something like that. Just bunk. Now that's a bit on the bright side and I might want to make it just a little bit larger, maybe about like that, but it's too bright. I wish it wasn't white. I wish I could see through it to the blue that's underneath. Well, we can do that if you look at the top of the layers panel. Oops before I do this, let me choose undue. I didn't want that to be on the same layer as the black paint that I put in because if I want to lessen uh the intensity of this whiteness, I don't want it to affect the black that's on that layer. So I'm gonna choose undo a few times until I get rid of that. And I'm gonna create a brand new layer. That's where I'm gonna put my white and I'm just gonna do that. Now, I want to lessen the weighted us. I want to be able to see through it. Well, you can do that at the top of the layers panel where you find a choice called opacity. Opacity means how much can I see through this? If it's completely opaque, you can't see through it. But if I click on the word opacity and I start dragging to the left, then you can start to see through it. If you bring opacity all the way to zero, you won't see it at all. And so I could dial in exactly how bright I think that should look maybe somewhere about like that. And now this is looking just a little bit like a three dimensional ball, although I might want to reposition that highlight. So it's a little bit further up into the left. So I'll grab my move tool and I'll just move it maybe about like that. And if any of it was going beyond the edge, I can't tell with this color of the background, I could also clip it as well. So it would only show up inside the shape of that circle. So layer create clipping mask. And if you ever clip more than one layer in a row, if you look in the layers panel, you'll see both of these layers have that down pointing arrow, but that down pointing arrow is pointing to the first layer that's not indented, that's what it's actually clipped to. So both these layers are clipped to that circle. Then let's talk about one final concept. Sometimes your layers panel is gonna start looking very busy and you'll want to organize it So right now these top three layers that are up here, I'm thinking of as a group, like if I wanna move one, I'm gonna wanna move them all. If I wanna scale one, I'm gonna wanna scale them all. And so I would like those three to show up as a single player. Well, I could select all three of those like that and then go to the layer menu and there's a choice called merge layers. And if you look at my layers panel, you'd find that those layers just combined together. But the problem now is I couldn't move one of them separately, at least, not easily. And I couldn't change for instance, the thickness of the stroke that black line that's around them because that just got completely incorporated into this. And I no longer see that letter FX on the side where that was added. Uh So now that's more permanent, I'm gonna choose undue by just typing command. Z. What I can do instead is with those three layers selected, I can get this folder icon that's known as a group. You can type command G to do the same thing as clicking this icon and watch what happens when I do. Well, all those layers just went inside of this folder and I could then expand the folder by clicking this little triangle to see what's inside of it. And I could see inside there. And uh I can see the three layers if I close it up, I don't see them, they're hidden inside the group. I can double click on the name of the group and I'll just call it top images. Then I could organize other things. Uh These three layers right here, make up this ball. And I'd probably want to be able to easily move the ball uh with the highlight and the shadow at the same time. Whereas right now, if I were to move the blue circle, it doesn't think it should relate to the other two. Uh So I might wanna select all three of those pieces. The highlight that's there, the shadow that's there, the blue ball that's there and put them all together into a folder and just call it blue ball. Then I could further organize this. That blue ball really relates to the word spain. It's kind of dotting the I on the word spain. So what I would like to do is make it. So if I move the word Spain, that ball moves automatically, so what I'm gonna do then is I'm gonna select all the layers involved. So here I have the blue ball and then if I want to get more layers, I can hold down command that's control and windows to get individual layers, I'd need all those. Then I'm gonna click the folder icon. The only thing is when they go into a folder, they're gonna come into one spot. So the blue ball will no longer be below top images in Spain being on top of it. So it's gonna have to go to one spot and I'm just gonna call that spain. Now you see my layers panel looks much simpler and I could even take these two layers. The only problem there is we have a background with little lock on it. Let's see if it'll let us if I do that and it won't, it won't let me put those in there because of the background. All you gotta do is change the name of the background, just call it texture and the lock goes away. It's no longer called background. It's now a normal layer. So now you can use all the features of layers with it. So if I click that I can now call this texture or background texture. And so now my layers panel looks overly simple and let's see what happens. Now if I click on Spain and I use my move tool to reposition things. Well, every single layer that is contained within that folder is gonna move. If I were to scale this with transform by typing command, t every single layer inside there is going to be transformed together, I'll hit escape because I didn't want to do that. And if I want to change the stacking order of my layers, uh then let's say I moved the word Spain. So it partially overlapped there. Uh Then I could click here in my layers panel, grab the word spain and drag it underneath those images. And you see the stacking order has changed. I don't know that I needed to have these overlaps. So I'm gonna move that back down. But just so you know, whatever you do to the folder will happen to all the layers that are contained within it. But then let's say I wanted the I to be a little higher or lower. Well, I could open the group that's called Spain. And inside there, I have another group called Blue Ball which contains three layers. As long as I have that folder active. When I use the move tool, it's gonna move everything that's contained within it. If I wanted to move instead, just one of those pieces like the highlight on the ball, I expand the folder and I make just that layer active. So now it's not the group that's active. The thing that looks like a folder, it's instead one layer and I could click here and reposition it. Choose on dukes. I didn't really want to do that. But that little folder which is known as a group is a way of organizing your layers. And when you put them into groups, you can collapse the group to simplify. And if the group is active, whatever you do, if it's moving, if it's deleted, if it's scaling will happen, everything is contained within that group. And so that's a nice way to kind of simplify your layers panel and organize it once it starts to be coming out of hand. Now there are many other features related to using layers and we're gonna have multiple sessions coming up that discuss those other features. In fact, the next lesson coming up is on something called a layer mask. A layer mask is going to allow us to hide part of a layer in a way that's not permanent and therefore it's like erasing something but in a way where you could change your mind later. And so we'll get into that and later on, there'll also be another session called it. I think advanced layers. And that's where we'll look at all sorts of other features related to this. I just hope you have a sense now for how you can build up an image using layers and each layer is just an independent piece of your overall image and that it's usually the most versatile way of working because things generally aren't permanent. Because if you had a stroke around the edge, you could turn off the stroke or change its color uh or do other things. And the final final thing is whenever you have a layered file, save it in either Photoshop or Tiff format, there's no quality difference between those two. And in general, you could flip a coin if you want to pick between them, it doesn't really matter. I personally use Tiff. But unless you create massively huge files you'd never really notice the difference.