From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Exploring layer basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Exploring layer basics

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- [Instructor] Photoshop's ability to work with layers is one of my favorite features. So, let's take a look at how we can master the Layers panel in order to easily work with multiple images in a single document. I'm going to start by creating a new file. I want it to be 4,000 pixels by 2,500 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. I'm going to open it as an RGB document in 8 bit and use the advance options here in order to open it in the Adobe RGB space. I'll go ahead and choose Create, and now we have our new document. Then I'm going to move to Bridge and open the greens and pears images by selecting them, and then using Command + O on Mac or Control + O on Windows. So we can see the tabs for all of our open documents and we can click on those in order to move through them. I want to see them all at once so that we can combine them into a single document. So I'll choose Window, Arrange, and then Tile. Or if you've been following along, you can use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + T. Now that we can see all of our documents, I want to move the pears and the greens into the untitled document. I also like the move tool and click anywhere in the greens document to target it. And then from the Layers panel, I'm going to drag and drop, holding the Shift key, the background onto untitled-1, and the reason that I held down the Shift key was to place it in the center. Then we no longer need this file open, so let's close it. I'll click on the pears image. And again, from the Layers panel, I will click and drag, holding down the Shift key, and drop the pears onto the untitled document. All right, let's close this document. And now we have our untitled document that has multiple layers in it. If I want to toggle the visibility of a layer, I can click on the eye icon. If I hide Layer 2, I can see Layer 1, but there is a difference between having a layer visible and having a layer targeted. So once I click on Layer 1, that becomes the targeted layer. Now Layer 2 is targeted, but it's not visible, but we can make it visible. All right, I'm going to hide Layer 2 and Layer 1, and click on the Background layer. So the Background layer is unique. There are several things that you can't do because it's locked. You can't change the stacking order. So for example, I can't move it above Layer 1, and I can't reposition its location on the canvas. So I can't use the move tool and move it up or down. In fact, because I have Auto Select selected, it actually unselected the background layer when I did that. So I'll target the background layer again, and the background layer can't have transparency. So even for example, if I tap the "e" key to select the eraser, and I have black as my background color, when I paint or erase in the image, it's actually not erasing to transparency, it's erasing to that background color. So let me undo that because it's really easy to fix this. All I need to do to convert the background into a layer is just click on the lock icon. All right, now just to tidy up our Layers panel, I'm going to click the eye icon and then double click where it says Layer 1. That's going to allow me to rename it, and I will call this layer "greens". And then I'll do the same, I'll make Layer 2 visible, and double click and call this "pears". It might also be helpful to see these icons a little bit larger. So from the Layers panel, I'm going to choose Panel Options, and let's increase the thumbnail size for our layers. I'll click OK, and now we can see they're a little bit larger. We can also enlarge the panel by just dragging on the edge of it in order to make it easier to see. Okay, I only want the greens to appear in the upper area of the document. So I'm going to hide the pears and target the greens. And then I want to create a guide at the 50% mark in my image. One way to do this would be to go to the View menu and then choose to show your rulers. Then we can right click in the ruler area and change the units of measurement to percent. Then I'll click and drag in the ruler area to the 50% mark using the left side as the guide here. And I can also hold down the Shift key to snap to the ruler increments. So when I release the cursor, we see the cyan guide. I could also use the View menu and go directly to Guides, and create a new guide this way. Here I would tell it if I want a horizontal or a vertical, I would put it at the 50% position, and you could change the color of the guide. But since we already have one, I'll go ahead and hit cancel. Now, I'm going to switch to the move tool by tapping the "v" key, and I'm going to reposition the greens layer within the document. So I'll make sure that it's targeted and then just drag in order to move it up. But I don't want this area of the greens layer that falls below the guide in the document. So, I'm going to tap the "m" key, that will give me my marquee tool, and I'm going to position it right where that cyan guide meets the left side of the canvas. And then click and drag in order to select this whole area that's below the guide. Then I can tap the Delete key and that will delete that information from the layer. I'll use the contextual taskbar to then deselect. But that is a permanent change. I mean, right now I could use Command + Z in order to undo it, but once I save and close this file, we wouldn't be able to get that information back. So, with the pears layer, let's do this in a more flexible manner. I'll go ahead and make the pears visible and target it. And I'm going to use the frame tool. The frame tool has two options, a rectangle or a circle. And here we want to draw the frame where we want to see the pears. So I'm going to start in the upper left and then drag until the right side and that guide. When I release the cursor, we can see in the Layers panel there are now two icons, the icon for the frame, which I can click on, and the icon for the pears. If we target the frame icon, then we can use any of these handles and actually resize the frame. Or I can click on the pears icon and then I can reposition the pears within the frame. Or if I double click within the frame or hold down the Shift key and click on both thumbnails so they're both targeted, now we can move the frame with the content inside of it. All right, I'll use Command + Z in order to undo that. Now at this point, we've done enough work on the image that I would want to save it. So, I'll use the File menu and choose Save because it was a new document. I'll call it "Harvest", and I'll save it to the Exercise Files folder into the Layers folder as a Photoshop document with an Embedded Color Profile. I'll close the document, and when we scoot back over to Bridge, we can see our new Harvest.psd file.

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