From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Working with layer groups and the Frame tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Working with layer groups and the Frame tool

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- [Instructor] As you work with more and more layers, one of the things that happens is that your Layers panel might get a bit out of control. So, in order to organize your layers, you can use layer groups. Not only do they help organize layers, you can move all of your layers in a group at one time, you can scale them or transform them, change opacity and blend modes, you can mask all of them, and create special effects by adding layer effects to groups. So, how do we create a group? Well, I've got all four of the small images selected in the Layers panel, and I can choose the Layer menu and then choose to Group Layers or use the keyboard shortcut cmd + g on Mac or ctrl +g on Windows. Or I can simply drag all four of the layers down to the folder icon and that will create a group. Now, the group is closed by default, but we can use the disclosure triangle in order to show the contents of the group. I'm going to go ahead and double click on the name Group 1 and just call this Small Photos. Now, I know it might seem a bit overkill and it might take a little more time to make sure that the layers are all named, but if you're working in a collaborative environment and you're going to hand off your files to another artist or production team, or even if it's just you that has to revisit the files later to make changes, it really is to your advantage to keep track of and to name your layers. All right, with the Move tool selected, I'm going to turn off the auto select layer option, although I will also point out, you can set it to automatically select a group. Then, I'm going to make sure that the group is targeted just to show you that you can reposition all of the layers within a group because the group is targeted as opposed to an individual layer. We can also use the arrow keys if we wanted to nudge the position of the contents of the group, and we can use those arrow keys as well with a single layer. If we add the Shift key, it will move it in larger increments. All right, now it's time to add the logo to the image. So, in Bridge, I'm going to double click on the Logo.tif file. We can see there are a number of different layers here. There are some type layers as well as this ellipse layer, and there are already in a layer group. So, we'll want to view both of our open documents by choosing to Tile them. Then, I'll drag the logo group into the harvest document, holding down the Shift key, in order to drop it right in the center. Then, we can close the logo. And if we look at our Layers panel, because we have the small photos group open, Photoshop went ahead and dropped the logos within that group. So, you can nest groups in Photoshop, but it's also very easy to remove a group from within another. So, I'll just click and drag up. Now, if you see a cyan line around the entire small photos group, well then, if you release your cursor, it's just going to fall back into the group. But if you drag your cursor a little bit higher so that there's just a cyan line at the top of the small photos group and you release your cursor, then it will move it out of the group. All right, let's just close the small photos for now. And I think the logo's too large, so with the group targeted, if I want to transform all of the layers that are within that group, I can choose Edit, and then Transform, and then Scale. By default, when I drag any of the corner anchor points, it's going to scale this and keep the proportions constrained. Then, I can reposition it using the smart guides to center it in the image area and apply that transformation by clicking on the check. If I wanted to change the stacking order of any of the layers within the group, that's as easy as just dragging and dropping them in order to change their order. I'll use cmd + z in order to undo that. Now, to change the opacity of all of the layers in the group, I would want to target the group and then I can either enter in a value for the opacity, or we can use the triangle in order to use the slider, or I can position my cursor on top of the word opacity and I get the scrubby sliders where I can click and drag to the left or to the right, or we can simply enter in a value. So, I could tap 8, for example, on the keyboard as long as I have the Move tool selected, or actually any tool that doesn't have an opacity in the options bar, I'll tap 8 for 80. If I tap 6, I'd get 60%. Now, if you tap quickly like 3, 4, you could get 34%. But if I want to go back to 100%, I'll just tap 0. Or if you tap 0, 0, it'll take you to 0%. All right, I want to put this at about 80%, but I still think that just the ellipse is a little bit too bright. So, if I want to change the opacity of a single layer, I just need to target the layer and then we can use the opacity slider. Now that we've added this logo and it's in a circle, I want to use the Frame tool so that each one of these individual photos below is also in a circle. I'll hide the contents of the logo group, reveal the small photos, and let's start with the tomatoes. I'll select the Frame tool, make sure that I have the circular frame targeted, and then I'll start in the upper left and just drag down to the lower right holding down the Shift key in order to constrain it to a circle rather than an ellipse. I'll move to the peppers and I'll do the same thing, again holding down that Shift key. I'll move to the pumpkins, do the same. And then finally go to the strawberries and click and drag out my circle frames. Now, three things that I didn't mention and want to before we wrap up. If I ever want to duplicate a layer, I can select the layer in the Layers panel and choose Layer, New, and then Layer Via Copy or use the keyboard shortcut cmd + j on Mac or ctrl + j on Windows. If I ever want to duplicate a layer group, I can use the same shortcut, I can go to small photos, go to Layer, New, and then Layer Via Copy or use cmd or ctrl + j. Now, to delete a layer, I just need to click in the layer and drag it down to the trash icon at the bottom of the layer. And finally, if I want to color code a layer or a layer group, I can target it and then right click or ctrl + click on Mac and choose from any of the different colors. That just makes it easier to see as your Layers panel becomes more and more complex. All right, if you don't want that tag, we can go ahead and choose No Color. So, at this time, I'll do a File and then Save As. I'll increase the numeric sequence to 2, saving it to the same folder as a layered Photoshop file. Then, we can close that and I can move to Bridge where we can see the harvest 02 document.

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